"Hard Focus"

One of my housemates sent me a blog link about hard focus, saying she had thought of me when she read it. This was flattering, but not very accurate. I was going to write a post about the connection between Hard Focus and running until I revisited the blog and saw that the original source of the idea had been lifted from Haruki Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running", in light of which there's not much for me to say. I'll add only this thought: running is the easiest Hard Focus you'll ever get to do. There's no distractions and generally no excuses. There's a clear line between holding your focus and losing it. And, in the event of the latter, there's sometimes a long walk home.

That blog post resonated with me, starting with the term itself: Hard Focus, capital H, capital F. If you clicked that link above, I'm sure you know what the author is talking about. You have some project, maybe it's for work, maybe it's for yourself. You sit down to get it done, and there are a million things fighting you. A multitude of alternate occupations suddenly obtrudes on your attention: you could check your email, browse blogs, make a snack, anything but that one job. Battling that headwind to reach the steady plane of effort where real things are accomplished is indeed Hard, with a capital H.

So's running long distances though. I think that's what I like about the connection between running and focus. You don't just go out and run for two, three, four hours. You work up to it. You train, and your training is at least half psychological.

This made me want to try a little Hard Focus mojo on something besides running, and today at work I had a good opportunity, since I had a somewhat tedious job (testing out a new component I had written in a manner involving some tedious setup) that I was not especially looking forward to. I decided to treat the exercise almost like a workout. I filled up my water bottle, hit the head, took off my headphones, and I set my timer for two hours. For the duration of that time I did nothing but that one project; no email, no music, no web browsing, the bare minimum of interaction with co-workers. With 13 minutes to go, I had finished my testing and found that a part of my original design had been pretty naive, and that what I had wasn't going to work. That would usually be my cue to sigh and distract myself for a few minutes until I was ready to reconsider, but instead I kept my head down, and after 13 minutes passage I had a new design roughed out.

It worked pretty well, in other words, although by the time I relaxed my concentration at the end I felt rather "blown", unready to gather my focus for another round without some rest. Fortunately it was around quittin' time anyway.

I wonder how trainable this attribute is. If I could Hard Focus for 8 solid hours in a day I think I could accomplish pretty much anything.