The Focus You Fear

I’ve had a running list for most of the past year—things I want to get better at, projects I want to finish, skills I want to develop. At various points there have been four or five items on it, all getting some portion of my week. I’d rotate between them, make a little progress on each, and feel like I was being productive.

But when I look back honestly at what actually moved substantially during that time, the answer is: not much. Everything inched forward. Nothing transformed. I was busy with all of it and I couldn’t point to any one thing where I’d gone deep enough for the work to become genuinely good.

Then I think about the stretches where I did produce something I was proud of, and they all have the same shape. I’d gotten slightly obsessed with one thing. Not in a dramatic way—I just stopped splitting my attention. That one thing became what I thought about when I wasn’t working on it. I’d notice relevant ideas in unrelated places. Connections started forming on their own. The work got richer in a way that doesn’t happen when you’re context-switching between four different goals.

What Depth Actually Feels Like

There’s a difference between working on something and being in something, and I think the difference is time. It’s not necessarily clock time, it’s accumulated attention. When you’ve been sitting with one problem or one craft for weeks and months, your mind builds a kind of internal world around it. You hold more of it in your head at once. You start seeing patterns that aren’t visible in the first few sessions.

I’d compare it to the difference between visiting a city for a weekend and living there for a year. The weekend gives you landmarks and a rough sense of the place. The year gives you the backstreets, the rhythms, the things you’d never notice passing through. You can’t shortcut that. It takes sustained presence.

Research on deliberate practice points at something similar—concentrated hours in a single domain predict expert performance more reliably than raw talent or total hours spread across many domains. The depth itself is doing the work. It’s not just a nicer way of learning. It’s a different kind of learning.

When I split ninety days across four goals, I get about twenty days of depth on each. That’s enough to feel like progress but not enough for the interesting part to start. I stay in the shallows of every goal, where the effort-to-insight ratio is worst.

Busyness as its Own Kind of Avoidance

The part I’ve been slower to admit is that staying spread thin can itself be a way of hiding.

It doesn’t feel like hiding. My schedule is full. I’m making progress. I have things to show for my time. But if the net effect is that I never go deep enough on the thing that actually matters—the one I care about most, the one where real failure would sting—then all that productivity is serving a protective function. I’m staying busy enough to avoid the discomfort of committing.

Because that’s what real commitment costs. Choosing one thing means letting the others sit. It means I can’t tell the story of being someone who’s “working on everything.” And the scariest part: it means that if the one thing doesn’t work, I don’t get to blame the lack of time or the competing priorities. I gave it my attention and it wasn’t enough, or I wasn’t good enough. That’s a much harder thing to sit with than a crowded to-do list.

I think this is what’s actually going on when people procrastinate, most of the time. It’s not laziness—it’s the fear of what it would mean to really try. Keeping many things alive keeps the question of “am I good enough at this one thing” safely in the realm of theory. You never have to answer it because you never created the conditions where you could.

Starting is Mechanical, Not Motivational

When I catch myself in this pattern, the thing that actually helps isn’t thinking about it differently. It’s doing something absurdly small.

I ask myself what matters most right now—just one thing—and then I ask what the very next physical action is. Not “work on the project.” That’s too abstract to actually start. The physical action: open the file. Write a single bad sentence. Send the one email I’ve been putting off. Something so trivially small that it would be embarrassing to not do it.

Most of the friction I experience isn’t about not knowing what matters. It’s the gap between knowing and doing. Shrinking that gap to one tiny concrete step is usually enough to get me moving. And once I’m moving on one thing—actually in it, not just thinking about it—the pull toward the other things quiets down.

The Trade-off Nobody Wants to Make

The part of this that’s genuinely hard is the trade-off. Going deep on one thing for three to six months means other things stagnate. Not forever, but noticeably. You don’t get to maintain the appearance of balanced progress across every area of your life. Something has to give, and it has to be visible.

That feels like loss. And it is loss, in a sense. But the alternative has its own cost that’s easier to ignore: you never reach the depth where breakthroughs live. You stay at the surface of every goal, working hard and wondering why nothing feels like it’s really moving.

The people I’ve watched do work I genuinely admire tend to cycle through this. A few months of intense focus on one thing, then a shift. Not balance as most people think of it—more like a rotation of deliberate imbalance. Each cycle goes deep enough for the compounding to actually work, and then they move on to the next thing that deserves that kind of attention.

I’m trying to get better at this. It’s harder than it sounds, because the pull toward spreading thin is constant and it always feels reasonable. But I keep coming back to the same uncomfortable question: what would happen if I actually stopped hedging and gave one thing everything I had for six months?

The honest answer is that I’d find out whether I’m good enough. And I think that’s exactly why it’s so hard to do.