Focus, the world’s new oil

You might’ve heard about this thing called data, and about how important it is to the world — so much so, that The Economist called it the oil of the new era.

Data is, of course, very important. But is data without the minds that’ll grok it and transform it into more useful stuff? Nothing of course. And that’s why we’re — you and me — are here.

You must’ve been attracted by the title of this article and wanted to know more about new tips and tricks to turn your focus capacities up to eleven. I’d do the same, as my focus capabilities are dwindling as time goes by, that to our over-connected world, and to the sea of notifications we live in.

As a cure, I decided a series of changes like The One Tab Policy I wrote about in a previous article. I also decided to follow a strict plan where I can assess my abilities to focus for prolonged periods of time — and to improve them over time.

Writing is what I do everyday as part of my job. I, however, developed this procrastination issue where it takes me a lot of time to finish a simple, easy task. Each day, I’ll have a series of tasks to achieve — from reading books, to learning new stuff, … and writing these (seemingly) useless articles).

To be honest with you, I’m not totally sure this will ever work; or that I’ll be able to stick to the pre-made schedule, but so far so good. I don’t mean to scare you but, if everything goes well, you’d see one of these pieces popping up each day. (The hardest part is not write, frankly, as much as it is about finding new topics to write about them — which is not something these posts will be famous for, honestly — and writing silly things on the internet knowing that someone will, someday, maybe, read’em).

I hope my plans turn to be good ones and that I can keep’em checked. You’ll hear from me when do (and you won’t if they don’t).

My next milestone is to be able to produce nice articles, about nice topics everyday. I just remembered that there are tools and some blogs that try to give writers inspirations and ideas to write about. I’ll need to check them so that tomorrow’s piece would be less embarrassing than this one.

I’ll also try to set some word-count minimum to respect; the problem is I can’t see how many words I wrote on Medium, even though I sure they used to show it before. (I’ll use Google Drive if I can’t sort this out).

My calendar just sent me a notification, my next task starts in 5 minutes. See you tomorrow.