What are ‘areas of focus’ and how do they relate to your life areas?

Have you ever heard the term ‘life buckets’ or ‘life areas’? Most of us can break up our lives into a few different areas. It could be as broad as splitting it between work and personal. Or you might further dissect each of those and split your life up into even more buckets. There is a danger here in compartmentalising our lives. We don’t cease to be a husband or a father or member of our family when we are at work for example. And, as our lives become more and more connected, it is becoming far more common and acceptable for the different areas of our lives to intermingle. This has advantages and disadvantages, to be honest. But it is worth making the distinction between what are areas of focus and how do they relate to life areas.

What are ‘areas of focus’ and life areas?

Our life areas, are the different aspects of our life, or the different roles we have in life. This is not the same thing as areas of focus. Take, for example, a fairly simple project that you might have. We will make it a personal one and what we are trying to do is decorate our bedroom. This is a project. It will have a collection of notes attached to it, colour samples and charts, thoughts and ideas, pictures and furniture links etc. It will also have a series of tasks associated with it. Buying paint and materials for example and actually painting. What makes it a project is that it has an end point. There will come a point when the room is completed and the project is done. Areas of focus are similar, but they do not have a defined end point where it is completed. Two of my areas of focus include physical health and fitness and also personal Bible Study. In a previous job an area of focus was financial management. These had notes and tasks attached, some recurring tasks, but they were never/are never going to be ‘finished’ whilst I am alive or whilst I have the various roles that I have.

So, a life area is the buckets into which you can break up your life, representing the different roles that you have in life. An area of focus is a specific area of interest which represents something that you want to do, achieve or maintain but where it doesn’t have a predefined completion point to it.

For clarity, my life areas at present are Personal, Family, Ministry & Work. There is an inter relationship between these and they all sit underneath being a follower of Jesus. My areas of focus, for the time being fall under categories of Discipleship, Marriage, Family, Health & Wellbeing, Growth, Church, Effective Faith and ‘Other work’. The other work category will be defined more carefully as this develops.

As you will look at those, you will note that some of my areas of focus, seem to fit neatly into the life areas but it isn’t that simple.

How do areas of focus relate to your life areas?

The reality is that our lives do not split up into segments. We have one life given to us by God. And we are one person living that life. It is one of the reasons why it bothers me so much when people in public life claim that what happens in private should not impact their public office. I am not saying that we should therefore have full right of access to everyone’s whole life, but it isn’t like they are two different people. It is one person. And therefore every area of focus that you will have will feed into all of the others and every aspect of your life and be fed by all of the others and every aspect of your life. We know that the fitter we are and the healthier we are, then the more energy and mobility we will have. This will make us a better parent, a better spouse, a more productive and useful employee etc etc to give one example of this.

The reason why I have areas of focus is because I do not want to be passive in any area of life or in any of the roles that God has given to me. And so, in examine these roles, I will carefully think about different ‘areas of focus’ that I can have in order to grow and develop in godliness, maturity, knowledge and capability in these areas. And all to enable to discharge the roles that God has given me in a more God honouring way.

As I said, they inter-relate and it is this inter-relationship that I have neglected in the past and that I am trying, in a very faltering way to be better at now. And here I have failed in the past. So, my approach in the past has very much been to fully compartmentalise my life in my own mind. And then to rank each area’s importance relative to all the others. Whatever ranked top ALWAYS got first dibs of my time, my focus and my attention. This proved to be a disastrous approach. I learned this when all the things I had neglected in order to always respond to my then bosses’ requests immediately, began to cause him problems later down the line. The next level approach was to consider the impact of each area of focus on the others and then allocate my time accordingly.

Now, I am considering ways to leverage these different areas, in order to support the others. For example, my fitness area of focus serves my parenting as I have more energy. But, there have been occasions where I have taken some of my older children out for a run with me which then also serves my relationship with them in the now, and trains them for their own health down the line.

I haven’t really figured this out yet, but it is something I am slowly thinking through.

How to maintain/achieve your areas of focus

Projects, habits & routines

By and large there are two ways to maintain and improve your areas of focus:

1. Creating discrete projects that serve them
2. The formation of or the stopping of habits and routines.

The best way to explain this is to give a multitude of examples of how I have done this in the past.

1. When managing the finances of a church I used to work for I had a few checklists of tasks that I ran through every day, week, month, term and year. This was all to do with habits and routines. I also created numerous projects in this area to review and tweak the way things were done and reported to improve the whole process.
2. I seek to read the Bible and pray every day and this habit serves both my discipleship and my growth. I will also set myself ‘study’ projects on different topics or books of the Bible to supplement this.
3. I have a running plan that I am trying to follow which falls into the habit/routine type but I have also started a project to learn about bodyweight training and exercises that can be done at home.

Planning & focus time

In order to actually work all of this out you need to have time scheduled in to think all of this through. When you start a new project, you might have an initial planning session to brainstorm different ideas and thoughts on how to go about it and to map out all of the tasks and steps required to complete the project. As an area of focus has no deadline or completion criteria, it falls to you to consider how to approach this. Each month, I plan to focus on two or three of my areas of focus. In that time I will consider how it is going, what problems and issues there are or things holding me back, what projects could I create to move things forward in this area and what habits, routines or tasks might be needed to keep things in order. Without this time, these areas would become neglected and that’s when things start to go wrong.

This is where your planning comes in. A lot of these things will not happen unless you plan for them to happen and allocate time for it. If you want to follow a running a plan, you cannot just go out for run ‘as and when you have a spare half an hour’. Obviously you will have the occasional spare slot and you can of course use that to go for a run. But, if this your approach with many different areas, then you will likely find that there are many things demanding that slot all at once and in the moment it is very hard to discern what is the most valuable. We will inevitably choose whatever is shouting at us the loudest as being the most important thing. As I have said before in my posts on planning, taking time to think this through gives us the opportunity to consider things from a distance and then allocate time for whatever we consider is important.

Do you consider it important to read the Bible and pray with your spouse? It will not happen unless you both agree when it will happen and earmark time for it. Do you want to consistently spend time reading the Bible and praying by yourself? It will not happen unless you plan consistent time for it. Do you want to exercise regularly, do you want to be more on top of your finances, do you want to read more or write every day? Whatever it is, whatever is important to you and whatever fits into your ‘areas of focus’ to enable you to be more effective across the whole of your life, whatever it is, it will not happen if you do not set aside time for it to happen.

In a sense, the way to maintain and grow these ‘areas of focus’ it acknowledge in your mind that they are important, and then set aside time where you will focus on them as the most important thing, to the exclusion of everything else. If you cannot do that, then you are simply acknowledging that in your mind, the other things that your time might go to, actually matter more.

Figuring out your areas of focus and your life areas

Start by making a list of all of the roles that you have in your life. That could include roles that you have at work, roles that you have in your family, roles that you have in your church or any community organisations that you are a part of. You might end up with a list that would include things like this:

1. Christian
2. Husband
3. Father
4. Small Group Bible Study Leader
5. Swimming Coach
6. Finance Team Leader
7. H&S Coordinator
8. Blogger

Once you have this list, you can consider what your broad life areas are. With both of these lists, you can consider what your areas of focus are. Every person will have different list but the following are true for us all:

1. Health & Wellbeing
2. Family & Relationships
3. Personal Finances
4. Growth

Your areas of focus should be things that serve you in the different roles that you have in life. As I said, they are bit like open-ended projects to keep you focussed on what you need to do to in order to discharge these roles effectively. You can group these into categories as well if you like.

When you have your areas of focus list, I would recommend setting yourself an aim — what would it look to continually discharge your roles in these areas well. Then consider what do you need to do in order to meet that aim. What projects do you need to undertake to move you closer? What habits and routines are needed to maintain it.

Carl Pullein has written an excellent article on this and I highly recommend that you take a look at that. https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/areas-of-focus-the-foundation-of-all-solid-productivity-systems/9/9/2020