focus = results

A year ago I was writing a blog post entitled “The Power of Focusing on Something” but in the end I couldn’t get it into great shape to post and so I chose to step back and leave it alone. Finally I am ready to post something a year on :)

Examples of losing focus for me

I have now prepared a few examples that make a lot of sense and I wanted to share. The great thing about having your own projects or your own business as a sole proprietor is you have no one to blame but yourself when something goes right or something goes wrong. My websites provide this for me. Below is a graph of traffic to my websites for the last decade (I left in the numbers since you can see them on quantcast here which measures things a bit higher than I do) in red and revenue per day in blue.

At every major life change in the above graph my website performance slipped esp. in terms of revenue (which is in my experience driven more by short term focus than traffic for advertising driven websites – sales, network choice and optimization etc…). Each of these changes was very necessary and good for me overall but the websites provide a good independent measure of how they distracted me from other things in my life. These changes took away focus and losing focus harmed performance.

Regaining Focus

I have settled into my job at Facebook now and so have some time to focus on my websites again. One thing I did recently was start to focus on videos of me making paper airplanes. These videos get a lot of positive feedback, are easier to follow than diagrams of me making paper airplanes and thanks to the new youtube revenue sharing also make me money. There is a graph below of the daily views of my videos on youtube.

You can see clearly what recent efforts I have made have done. Daily views on my videos have doubled and now something between 200 and 600 hours a day are spent by people viewing videos of me making paper airplanes in fact on average every visitor to my site views one paper airplane video.

My Conclusions

All of this spills into my real life. During those periods of negative website performance I also stopped going to the gym, stopped going out and really became pretty introverted.

So bottom line focus = results and lack of focus = fail. If you are going to make a major change as a business, as a team leader, as an individual, as a wife, husband, son, father, brother or whatever realize that it’s a trade off and make that trade off of focus explicit.

Is the upside of a new focus worth the downside of focusing less on something else?

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