Listing areas of focus: A key to getting things done (but maybe not by me)

In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen devotes only a couple of pages to the Areas of Focus list, key areas of responsibility in your work and personal life. However, sitting down and listing my areas of responsibility — especially in my job — was such an instrumental part of clarifying what things I actually should be doing that I would recommend doing it at the beginning of the process.

When I started listing my work projects, I realized I needed an Areas of Focus list as a way to get a handle on what my projects actually were. I could have decided a project was something very broad, such as “Human Resource Information Systems,” but in truth, that was an area of focus under which I had several projects cooking.

When I wrote down my areas of focus for work, I came up with 10 very large areas. I could see right away that this was a really big list. No wonder I felt overwhelmed at work. I was trying to “focus” on too much. This was a key insight, and writing out my Areas of Focus list crystallized it for me.

My first question was: What could I drop? The two most obvious candidates were SharePoint and Website Development. These were old hangers-on in my job, and even though I was still interested in both, I didn’t want them to be the focus of my work. We were already developing skills in these areas in others, both in IT and in other parts of the organization, and we could easily hire to fill in any gaps. So once my remaining commitments are fulfilled and the resources needed are in place, I can remove two items from my Areas of Focus list.

I think my list is still long and probably more weeding is needed to be done. But what remains on my list is either a) clearly part of my job and/or b) something I have a passion for. Still, I have already identified another couple of candidates that can either be scaled back or dropped entirely.

I also used my Areas of Focus list when I drafted my Projects List. I wanted every project on my list to be clearly tied to an area of focus. So I was going through my calendar and I saw a meeting titled “Helpdesk Summit” coming up in a couple of weeks. What project was that? After a little thought, I remembered that it was a meeting to think about ways to expand our helpdsk system into other support services beyond IT. Now, this was clearly not even remotely related to any of my areas of focus. Worse yet, I had scheduled the meeting, so I would be responsible for prepping for it as well as (probably) managing any actions coming out of it.

Why had I scheduled that meeting? Probably because I recognized there was a need and no one was addressing it. It is a tendency of mine to jump in there and try to solve problems when and where I see them, regardless of whether I am directly responsible for coming up with the solution. There is too much need in our organization, and I could be endlessly distracted from my core job responsibilities if I tried to address every one of them. I simply have to stop doing this.

I cancelled the meeting. What a relief to guiltlessly remove things off my plate.

I have learned from writing out my Areas of Focus list and seriously looking at how what I was actively doing every day fit into my areas of focus that one reason we are not getting things done is because we’re trying to do the wrong things. Allen makes this point in his book, but this exercise brought it home for me. So one of my resolutions from now on is to say no to anything that does not fall under one of my areas of focus. I am also going to work on focusing (ha ha) the list even more and not adding a new area of focus without figuring out a way to remove an old one, so that my job does not mushroom exponentially out of control.

Now I just need to get my boss to do the same thing!