I just finished listening to Alex Epstein’s podcast, The Human Flourishing Project: 6 kinds of focus. In it, he outlines a framework for focusing on various areas of your life to improve your overall productivity and life enjoyment.  The six areas are 1) focusing on a high-value and meaningful market, 2) focusing on an area of comparative advantage, 3) focusing on the most valuable few projects, 4) focusing on performing your core work, 5) focusing on inevitably productive processes, and 6) focusing on self-improvement

I found it enlightening and tried to apply his framework to my life. Here it goes.

High-value and meaningful market

As Alex describes it, this high-value and meaningful market does not just apply to businesses, but can be for anyone creating a product.  I might even broaden the area of focus to include high-value and meaningful “people”, such as friends and family.  However, his overall point carries a lot of validity.  While it’s okay to just develop things for yourself to enjoy, sometimes slight tweaks to a creation can also be extremely valuable to others.  For example, I primarily wrote my e-commerce textbook for myself, but with a several tweaks, I made it valuable to other professors as well.

I think I do a great job of this at home, with my family.  Where I struggle the most is applying the same level of focus on the job. As a professor, I have several meaningful markets, my students, my colleagues, and other academics when I’m writing research. I’m also considering starting a side e-commerce business, but I have no clear conception of who the high-value and meaningful market would be. In fact, starting a side business may be more of a distraction than a help.  If I can narrow my focus to just one high-value and meaningful market, it will help improve the quality of my work.  I see this with some professors that focus all their effort on research at the expense of students.  While other professors focus all their efforts on students and ignore other academics.

Comparative advantage

My focus here is much clearer. I’m an expert in e-commerce generally, more specifically with human behavior online, and even more narrowly in privacy actions and team work. My PhD taught me to be a researcher, so I have skills with developing objective research projects for understanding the world and writing my findings for others to consume. I also have skills developing course materials for consumption by my students and use by other instructors.  Where I need to improve is focusing my time and effort on a smaller set of activities, the things I’m really good at, and outsourcing as much other activities as I can.

Few most valuable projects

From 2011 to 2017, I nailed this, with a deep focus on research and teaching that enabled me to achieve tenure and promotion to Associate Professor. That focus continued as I finished writing my e-commerce textbook in the summer of 2019. Since then, I’ve had projects and stayed fairly focused on them, but I don’t have the burning passion and focus on the “few most valuable” projects. That’s in part because I don’t have clear long term goals to drive me forward. I want to be a full professor, start a side e-commerce business, and write another book or two. These are all interesting, but nothing is capturing my attention like it can and should. I need to find a burning passion for something and then attack it with a vengeance.

Until then, I have a series of research projects ongoing and a some course improvement projects. They are keeping me engaged enough in work that I keep moving forward. But I need to just go all in with some big fat hairy goals.

Performing your work

If I understand Alex correctly, this area of focus deals with time management, particularly with time blocking (and life blocking). This is an area where I perform at a high level. Over the past few years, I’ve successfully time-blocked my schedule as a means of prioritizing certain work but also to ensure I get enough performance time, working on core work activities.

Inevitably productive processes

This phrase I first heard from Alex – the “inevitable productive process”.  Essentially, this concept describes processes that lead to inevitable outcomes due to a series of accountability, feedback , and practices that once triggered, produce results.  On a small scale, this might be something like a bedtime routine that gets triggered as you head to bed.  It might include something like brushing your teeth, an inevitable process that helps ensure your teeth stay clean.

Developing processes that inevitably improve your outcomes should be the goal. For example, I use Getting Things Done productivity system to radically improve my organizational and time management processes. Once I adopted this system, it created a huge improvement in my inevitable productivity. I also have a scheduled “accountability” call every morning to help make other processes more inevitable.

That said, I could focus more on productive processes in writing and content creation.  My writing has never been a efficient and doesn’t lead to inevitable productivity.  With more focus, I’m confident I can produce more high quality content consistently and quicker.

Self-improvement

While Alex called this area of focus “personal progress”, I prefer the term self-improvement.  There’s a number of different ways I’ve done this over time, including focusing on productivity.  But it also includes improvements in multiple areas in my life, from health to knowledge acquisition.  Just last week, I noted this lack of focus in my life. My self-improvement efforts were lax, leading me to coast along at my current state. This year, I plan to study for and acquire several new technical certifications.

Focus

Going through this exercise helped me to see areas in my life where I can apply more focus.  Doing so will undoubted help improve my productivity and happiness.  First, I need to better define what high-value and meaningful market I want to focus on.  Unless otherwise required by a job, I’m going to de-emphasize everything else.

Second, once the first area of focus is defined, I’m going to focus more on a few big projects that will get me where I want to be.

Third, I will align my self-improvement goals with these few big projects so that I can develop and keep refining my processes for making my creations.