How to Choose Your Focus 3 Every Day
If you've been around here for awhile, you know that we choose a daily Focus 3 so we know where to spend our best time and energy every day.
Focus 3 is a tool to help you ditch your never-ending to-do list and go through each day feeling peacefully productive, because there's nothing worse than laying your head down at the end of the night feeling like you didn't accomplish anything important.
Today let’s chat about how to learn how to choose what makes the cut for your daily Focus 3!
Before I tell you HOW to choose your Focus 3, let’s back it up and break down exactly what Focus 3 is in case you need a little refresher.
We’ll start with the 5 Keys to Hustling Sanely - the 5 Keys to Hustling Sanely are the foundation of how to live a peacefully productive life. They are the big umbrella of everything I teach.
The 5 Keys to Hustling Sanely are:
Get your mindset right.
Get clear on your vision.
Define your priorities.
Create your schedule + routines.
Implement Hustle Sanely 5 (or HS5) every day.
Hustle Sanely 5 or HS5 is a list of 5 intentional things that the Hustle Sanely Squad does every day to help us work toward our goals without sacrificing our mental health and relationships. I view them as our daily Hustle Sanely action steps. The 5 HS5 tasks are:
Complete your Focus 3 *ding ding this is where we’re digging in today*
Move for 30 minutes.
Tidy for 15 minutes.
Say or do one kind thing for yourself.
Say or do one kind thing for someone else.
So, again it goes big umbrella: 5 Keys to Hustling Sanely, which part of that is HS5, and part of that is Focus 3. You follow me? I hope so, lol. Let’s keep rolling.
Your Focus 3 are the 3 things on your to-do list that are non-negotiable for that day. 3 things that you deem “most important” to get done. The 3 things that you want to give your best time and energy to.
Y’all know that I’m not a fan of never-ending daily to-do lists. They overwhelm us and leave us feeling defeated at the end of the day if we didn’t complete them or exhausted if we did. Instead, I like to have a master to-do list somewhere (mine is in my planner) where I keep track of important tasks that need to be done and when they need to be done by. I also have a place in my journal where I have the goals I’m working on each quarter and a list of action steps necessary to meet them.
I use these 2 lists to help me plan my priority tasks for each month, week, and day.
Here’s what I used to do before Focus 3:
01. Have a long, running daily to-do list with everything that needed to get done for life and work.
02. Stare at it feeling stressed out before the day really started because I didn’t know where to start.
03. Pick something easy to do first so I could just check something off and feel accomplished.
04. Randomly choose tasks from the list all day - haphazardly starting one, getting halfway through it, then starting another one because I felt behind and wanted to hurry my way through the list.
05. End the day feeling like I was busy all day but didn’t have anything to show for it because I was pecking away at tedious, unimportant tasks with a false sense of productivity.
06. Move all of the tasks over to the following day’s to-do list.
07. Go to bed feeling defeated, yet again, by my never-ending to-do list.
08. REPEAT EVERY FREAKING DAY.
Now here’s what life looks like using Focus 3:
01. I set monthly goals and prioritize my non-negotiables that align with my life’s vision.
02. During my monthly check-in meeting, I use those goals and non-negotiables to help me determine what my Top 3 tasks are each week for the month.
03. Every Friday during my weekly prep meeting, I use each week’s Top 3 tasks to help me prioritize my Focus 3 action steps for each day.
04. I head into the week knowing what needs to be done instead of staring at a daunting to-do list so I spend my energy doing what needs to be done instead of trying to figure out what it is.
05. I end each day feeling accomplished, knowing that I gave my best time and energy to tasks that move me closer to my goals.
With Focus 3, I know that if I get those 3 things done then the day can be considered productive, even if nothing else gets done on the list. Now this isn’t an excuse to hurry up and finish those 3 things and then fluff off the rest of the day. This is just a strategy to make sure that you are giving your time and energy to tasks that are actually going to move the needle toward your goals every day.
The cool thing with using Focus 3, is you can adapt it to work for you. Some gals in the Hustle Sanely Squad do one set of Focus 3 items for the day and include items from both personal and professional goals. Some do 2 sets of Focus 3s every day: one for personal and one for work. Remember what I said at the beginning, eat the fish and spit out the bones. There is not ONE right way - there is only the way that serves you best. Try out both if you have to and see which one fits.
Okay so I feel like you’ve probably got a pretty solid grasp on what Focus 3 is so I’m gonna share 3 tips for choosing your Focus 3 every day:
01. Choose needle moving tasks by asking yourself these questions:
~ What needs to get done TODAY? What items are time sensitive?
~ What 3 things do I need to accomplish to feel like I had a peacefully productive day?
~ What tasks will help me get one step closer to my goals?
~ What tasks require more mental energy?
02. Don’t choose habits and routines as your Focus 3.
It’s tempting to want to put day to day things on your Focus 3 but I encourage you to reserve your Focus 3 for tasks that aren’t automatic for you.
Example: I never put “work out” on my Focus 3 because working out daily is something I’ve been doing since I was like 20 and I’m 31 now. BUT if starting a workout routine is one of your current goals and it’s not your norm to workout every day yet, then working out can totally be part of your Focus 3 until it becomes a habit. Make sense?
Before you put something down as your Focus 3, ask yourself, “Is this something I would do without really thinking about it anyway?” If so, I don’t think it should make the cut for your Focus 3.
03. Schedule your Focus 3 according to your energy.
I’m a big fan of getting my Focus 3 items done early in the day because here’s how it works for me - when I get those big energy tasks done early on, it pumps me up. I feel so accomplished and aligned with my goals and then I have the stamina to crank through some of the tedious tasks at the tail-end of my day and I end up getting more done but without that feeling of burn out because I leaned into my energy levels instead of working against them.
I like to think about my daily energy in the sense of hiking because I love hiking and it makes sense:
If you have a big hike planned, you don’t do 3 little hikes and then the big hike - you wouldn’t have energy left to tackle the big hike - it would take you WAY longer and you wouldn’t enjoy the process because you’d be so worn out.
You start with the big hike first thing because your energy tank is full. It’s still hard but you’re able to power ahead and take in the scenery as you go because you have plenty of energy left in your tank, right? You’re so pumped after the big hike because you just completed an epic hike, that you have some fuel left to do 1-2 small hikes after that.
That’s how I imagine doing your Focus 3 early on in the day works, too.
You complete what HAS to be done and then you have time and energy to spare on other things. You aren’t totally burnt at the end of the day which allows you to show up well for all areas of your life.
If you enjoyed this post, tune into episode 070 of The Hustle Sanely Podcast to listen into this topic!
