My life is so full of demands for my time. Employees need direction, my wife and kids deserve my attention and time, my tasks require time, my hobbies and interests are only developed with time, and there are still emails to attend to. There is no shortage of things to do and the older I get, the more demands I have on my time. 

Sometimes the only way I can finish anything is to get away from all other responsibilities, distractions, and duties to direct all my attention at one specific task or objective. Just forget everything else and zero in on the one task at hand.

There is tremendous power in focus. I have been amazed at the amount of things I can can accomplish and that I have seen others accomplish when they set their mind to a specific objective and remove all distractions from their path to completing it.

The difficulty for me is more about making the focus time. I find myself attempting to steal a few minutes or a couple hours, but it always seems that I end up just starting to make progress when my time is up. This translates next to recognizing that I have a window of time that I could possibly use, but I find myself deciding to not bother because I have a hard time even starting to work on anything.

The other perspective I have been recognizing is the power of delegation and hiring others. To date, I have focused on expanding my skills with time management and have been able to juggle most things fairly well. Now I find myself disinterested in the things I was able to juggle and I’m having a harder time managing them. Take my real estate investments as an example. I have not put the time into filtering applicants that I should have and now I have issues with tenants and have been getting tenants in my apartments that are less than ideal. I have finally realized that I have the same passion or interest in managing the rentals anymore. There are people who are interested in such things and actually do a great job in managing properties. So, if there are people I can hire to manage that and free up some of my time to focus on things that are more interesting to me, why not give it a shot?

I am now reviewing every aspect of my life and responsibilities and looking for ways I can find freedom in my responsibilities to afford me the time I need to focus on the things that are most interesting to me. When it comes to managing employees and my businesses, I am focused on building clear systems and delegation of responsibilities.

Overall, the most impactful change I am focused on is simply being engaged with the people around me and the tasks immediately before me. I’m focused on being present and not future focused or beating myself up internally for past decisions.

I’m focused on freedom.

-joe