Areas of Focus

C

curtis

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I know the definition of Area of Focus; it is some category of my life that i never check off as being done. I came up with a few like Health, Family, Spiritual Direction, Home, Friends etc., for starters. That being stated, what is the next step after i establish these headings?
 
I think many just use this as a checklist or brainstorming tool during their reviews, to help them ensure that nothing important has been left out from their list. That is the purpose of having Areas of Responsibility aka Areas of Focus defined. Many people also seem to congest levels 2-5 into just this Area of Focus level and leave the rest out.

Personally (but I seem to be a minority) I keep my AoRs very carefully defined - at a very mundane level - such that I have no difficulty placing projects into just one AoR. I also group my projects accordingly, such that I can conveniently review them area by area, which saves me review time as I do not have to switch mental contexts equally often during the review. It also allows me to split the review across a number of sessions.

I leave level 3-5 stuff entirely out of the equation at level 2. For example, permanent life values such as health and wealth etc do not have any corresponding areas (level 2) for me. I try to keep my areas strictly defined as Responsibilities, such as job titles, roles etc. This is what works best for me, and this is actually how I also read the 2001 book. YMMV
 
curtis said:
I know the definition of Area of Focus; it is some category of my life that i never check off as being done. I came up with a few like Health, Family, Spiritual Direction, Home, Friends etc., for starters. That being stated, what is the next step after i establish these headings?
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Areas of Focus are drivers of projects and next actions. Look at your project list against your AoF's. How you do this depends on your tools, but doing it does not. Are you doing what you need to be doing? Are there things you want to do? Are your projects aligned with your Areas of Focus? Is there any thing that comes to mind that you need to capture? Are all the important areas of your life represented? What changes have happened and how do you want to respond? These questions will give you a good start, and you can repeat the process as often as needed.
 
curtis said:
I know the definition of Area of Focus; it is some category of my life that i never check off as being done. I came up with a few like Health, Family, Spiritual Direction, Home, Friends etc., for starters. That being stated, what is the next step after i establish these headings?
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Make sure that you are happy with the progress in those areas and if not create some projects to work on them.

I used to be very concerned about projects and AOFs and kept my projects in folders by AOF. But in my world the AOFs may be distinct but the projects all blur together and can support many AOFs. For example: I have an AOF of Improving the Sheep Flock and one of Continual Education. I have a project that is to look at the source code for calculating EBVs and adapt to handle differing covariances and heritabilities for the selected traits for my breed. Now the result of that will help me improve the sheep flock by getting more accurate EBVs for our breed. And the learning about the code and adding the appropriate linear equations to handle the changes is part of ongoing learning. When I had to put a project into a single AOF "folder" I found it hard to locate when I had things I wanted to add either as project support or for ideas to explore as next actions. I found that trying to define the AOs so tightly that no project could fit into more than one was strangling me and kept me from making real progress. So now I just keep all my current active projects in one big active projects folder for one off projects. I do still split out the recurring or checklist type projects into a folder for things that reoccur once a month or several times a year and one folder for each quarter for projects that are only once a year but have to start or finish in a specific timeframe. Farming has lots of repeating projects that have to be done as a specific time of year. I keep my list of AOFs as a separate document. I revisit my AOFs quarterly at my regular solstice and equinox deeper reviews.
 
I know some folks use areas of focus to delineate between all the "hats" they wear (i.e., father, spouse, manager, employee, churchgoer, boy scout den leader) and that has always seemed way to chaotic for me. I have folders in OmniFocus that separate the main areas of my life (e.g., Home, Work, Personal, Side Business) and that lets me focus on the right aspects at the right time. I think the simplicity of it works well.
 
I found it east to define my areas of focus because i complete a life chart every 3 months and that means i think about my areas of focus:Career,Family, Finance, Myself, Health, Relationships & Community. This last one i added after encouragement from this community. Most of my projects fit nicely into one AOF all though others such as finance may come into play. When i do a life chart and think about my AOFs, i create a document which tells me what i think of each area and how satisfied an dissatisfied i am. I may decide i want to do something about one area of focus. for example, if i'm unhappy about my career, i may decide to change jobs or just do some training at work or home, such as a new course or read a book. At this point i will try to come up with a new project(s), goals or vision. Eventually my ideas in these 3 horizons will solidify, sometimes there wont be any projects immediately , it may just be a goal to pick up new skills for a career change, the up shot is that i will come to a conclusion that may involve a new visions, one or more goals and/or one or more projects. i may even tone down my ideas just to one course (at the project level). This is the main way i use my AOFs.

Another thing i do is to classify which AOF my projects belong to (if possible). if i have 6 projects for my computer, i'll only want to do one at a time so as not not mess my machine up. So on my list of projects i will filter on AOF (Computer comes under Self as its a hobby) and decide which i want to do.

As i have each project in at least one AOf , it tells me how much i am focussing on each AOF. For example , i have lots of projects on self and career , but none on health and relationships. These are areas i want to improve thanks to my life chart and use of my AOFs.

Hope this is of use.... good luck
 
curtis said:
What prompts you to check your AoFs?
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The whole concept of having several different roles is fundamental to my understanding of my reality, and I need no prompting. I check it all the time, explicitly or or implicitly, as I keep my projects and actions organized by Area of Responsibility and have no way of not noticing if something is wrong (e.g. projects missing).

I believe maybe the main reason why this works for me, but not for others, is that I keep my AoRs defined strictly as level 2. I leave all higher horizons out of the picture (Purpose, Vision, Goals etc - levels 3 to 5). This enables me to assign all projects (and actions) to just one single very concrete Area. This is more difficult to accomplish this if you try to encapsulate higher goals, too, such as health, happiness etc, into the AoRs, because obviously almost every project could support several or even all such higher-level aims (health, wealth, happiness etc).

David Allen uses the terms Area of Responsibility and Area of Focus interchangeably, but in my mind the former is intuitively much clearer and more useful. I strongly suggest that you consider what these alternative words would normally mean to you - perhaps "duty" vs "desired consequence"? Just as in a company, a given task may benefit everyone (departments, owners, customers ...) but be the duty of just one single department to deal with. Same thing with AoRs. And even if a project requires participation of many departments, you still need to decide which single department or person must have the duty of taking the lead, which entails being overall accountable, report overall progress etc etc.
 
When i create a new project , i try to decide which AOF is the most appropriate. For my get a new job project, that's obviously career, it could rightly be in Finance since I'm earning money, but the main driver is clearly my career. I do this so that i dont have in progress too many projects in any of AOF and ifi want i can put all of my career projects in the order i want to carry them out. If my get a ne wjob project does have a significant effect on my finance then when i do my weekly review i bear this in mind. SO if a get a new job project is in CAREER and FINANCE, when i review my projects, it just effects which other career projects i do and whihc finance projects i do , maybe afterwards.
 
My original areas of focus were very close to suggested starting points.

Lately (yesterday) I went through the next actions I felt drawn to, identifying the higher levels for each all the way up to Purpose -- want to continue that for a few days -- the bottom-up approach makes those higher levels very meaningful as I can see how I am already investing time and energy in them, and opportunities to align efforts start to reveal themselves.
 
As I stated earlier, I have too many "linear" checklists, including my AoFs / AoRs.

Recently, I discoverd the "organigram" function in Word.
I ended up with one master organigram, which shows my various AoFs ("hats") and, hanging under each entry, sub-categrories.
When a sub-categry became too complex, I added a wholly new file with the sub-category-AoF as headline, under which I am hanging the corresponding [sub-]sub-categories.

I´m curious to see if this way of structuring is helpful when reviewing my AoFs at the weekly review!
 
I must admit that it took me quite a while to even try to create my P.I.L, vision and goals. I wasn't happy with it for a long time because it was so new. So like you i worked my way up and each time i create a project , i make a list of which AOFs its aligned to and see if it is part of one of my goals. Quite often finance and family are identified esp if I'm buying something, but usually i find it easy to identify a key one. This down up process helps me clarify how things fit together.

Thanks to Tom.9 for pointing out about organogram in word, that looks really cool, I'm going to try to use that to map my horizons instead of drawing pictures in Excel.
 
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