Simple Way to Improve Daily Focus

Graham Weaver shared a daily practice that has improved my focus.

When he appeared on Lenny's podcast, he noted that writing your goal every day, accompanied by 3 things you plan to do that day towards your goal helps you get more done.

Here's him talking about it in details:

(41:07) Graham Weaver: [...] When I was in college, I had this green notebook. And I was trying to row crew, and I never row crew before. And I wrote down at the top of the page every single morning, I wrote down, "I am the number one rower in the country." I wasn't. I was a freshman novice, 135 pound Midwesterner, never had been in a boat. But I wrote that down. And then I wrote down three things I was going to do that day to move toward that goal. And I did that every single day that I was in college. And it's just incredible. We talked earlier about your subconscious mind. You're just locking your subconscious mind into your goals and where you want to go and who you want to be and how you want to show up. It's really powerful.

(41:46) Lenny Rachitsky: And that's advice anybody can implement. "I want to be the best founder"

(41:50) Graham Weaver: You could do that. You could do that exactly.

(41:53) Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. It's such a simple thing. "I want to be the best product manager. Here's three things I'm doing today to help me along the lines."

(41:59) Graham Weaver: Absolutely. My students have to do this twice a week. It's one of their assignments, and they actually have to turn it in. And I have so many students that say five years later, "I still do this a couple times a week, and it's been unbelievable." I'd say this to all your listeners: you will get more done writing down your goal and three things you're going to do to move toward that goal, you'll get more things done in three months than you will in three years without that.

I've tried this tactic the past few days and focused on keeping my daily things simple.

One of my goals this quarter is to reduce my screen time.

My daily 3 things for that goal yesterday were:

• Add a 45 minutes timer on my phone's browser (after which, I can't use it anymore for the day)
• If I get the urge to watch YouTube on my phone, do it on my computer instead
• Restrict the number of times I can open the browser on my phone — I could not find an option for this in Android 🤷

Despite how simple these actions were, completing them gave me a great sense of progress, and momentum to keep going.