Tag Archives: “Circle of Influence”

Put your focus on focusing.

03 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in Discipline, Time Management, Uncategorized

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Last October I wrote about the Circle of Influence, and in doing so I made a fleeting mention of the briefly identified but ne’er seen again ‘Circle of Focus’.

Just to recap, Covey had detailed the Circles of Concern (everything affecting our lives) and Influence (things upon which we can have an effect) in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In his later First Things First he and his co-authors went further and defined a further, inner Circle of Focus.

They defined it as ‘things we are concerned about, that are within our ability to influence, that are aligned with our mission and are timely.’

He went on: ‘When we operate within our Circle of Influence we do some good, but what we do may be at the expense of something better. When we set and achieve goals that are in our Centre of Focus, we maximise the use of our time and effort.’

The question arises, therefore – how much time do we spend administering, pandering, diverting, interrupting (and being interrupted) and time-wasting at the expense of the time we should spend within that focused centre?

Life gets in the way. Professionals who once had staff to assist with all those things now find they have to do their admin (etc.) themselves and so their focus has become blurred as a result. But that doesn’t mean we can abandon the Focus at the expense of the mundane. It just means we have to manage our selves better.

Now, what tends to happen is that we do whatever arises as it arises – an e-mail pings, someone pops by, the phone rings – and we redirect our (very important) focus away in their direction.

Stop it. Stop it now – or at least as much as the Gods of customer service allow.

A thing that pings or rings or is passing(s) should be given only appropriate attention, not undivided, immediate attention if you are to maximise your productivity and effectiveness.

I suggest that you do a couple of things which might help you do that.

  1. Ignore emails, and plan to deal with them at a time which suits your responsibilities – maybe at the start of the day, immediately after lunch or last thins as part of tomorrow’s planning.
  2. Shut your office door if you can. People won’t interrupt if they can’t see you. Honest.
  3. Turn your smartphone off if you want uninterrupted time.
  4. Block time out for uninterrupted, focused thinking/doing time in your planning system Or, put another way, make an appointment with yourself and keep it inviolable.

While Covey and his associated training company never again seemed to refer to the Circle of Focus after the 1994 publication of First Things First’ I find that the concept of the Circle of Focus (like the short chapter on The Three Resolutions in ‘Principle Centred Leadership’) is one of the most profound time management concepts I’ve ever known.

Try it at work, if possible.

Set time aside for the most important stuff, the stuff which, if focused upon 100%, will provide the maximum bang for buck you can achieve.

Then try this at home……………………

All my life’s a Circle.

25 Friday Oct 2019

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I have taken to wearing a little badge. Here is a picture:

untitled

I have been asked if it is an RAF roundel, since I served in the RAF Police.

No.

The original badge is actually supposed to represent the Mod music genre, but that is not why I wear it, either.

I wear it because it represents (to me) one of Stephen Covey’s primary philosophies, that of the Circles of Concern and Influence.

(“But wait! There are three circles,” I hear you observe. Read more.)

In the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey wrote of two circles. An outer circle, called the Circle of Concern, which contains all those things we concern ourselves with, but don’t, won’t or can’t do anything about. Environment, politics, international treaties (!), gravity, and so on. They affect us, but we accept we can’t influence them. I’ll call that the Blue Circle.

There was then an inner circle (here, it is white) called the Circle of Influence, which contained all those things that matter to us about which we can do something. Our work, our families, our goals, and so on.

In the Seven Habits book Covey stopped there, but in his later book, First Things First, he and his co-authors introduced a further, inner circle called the Circle of Focus, which is where we spent as much of our time as we could if we were to succeed in getting the results in the Circle of Influence that we wished to achieve.

It was never again mentioned, oddly, and I don’t know why. But I still recognise it, and in m’badge it is the red bit in the middle. I want to spend my time there, achieving my goals and not, ultimately, wasting time on the things outside my Circle of Influence.

Cue controversial bit.

Two days ago, 39 bodies were found in a trailer in Essex. At that time they were believed to be illegal immigrants (refugees, economic migrants or others). In Parliament that same day, the Prime Minister said his ‘thoughts and prayers’ were with their families, who at that stage he didn’t and couldn’t have known, and I cringed, as I often do, at the expression ‘thoughts and prayers’, which to me now represent a meaningless cliché trotted out when, in truth, we don’t really care – but have to pretend we do if we don’t want to be criticised for a failure to be actively compassionate. (And knowing that some who trot it out are atheists makes it even worse.)

That’s not to say it isn’t a tragedy, horrific, a poor reflection of the fact that organised crime takes advantage of people. That’s a fact. But I find it hard to care about that fact.

Please – don’t consider me heartless. I shed a tear whenever I see programmes about those who died fighting in wars, and when I was recently with friends at the Mennen Gate in Ypres when the (daily) Last Post was played I had to hold it in. And having loved my father, Mike and the Mechanics song ‘In the Living Years’ is a killer (even though I never left anything unsaid). But I have an emotional, professional link to those who served, and to my family. Their loss means something to me. I have no such link to dead Chinese in Essex.

There are people out there who do hold responsibility for keeping immigrants safe, and I delegate my ‘concern’ to them. I am grateful they are there, doing what they do so selflessly, so that I can focus on ‘my’ Circle of Influence.

Unfortunately, in our world of immediate news, with graphic pictures and an endless stream of people who want us all to care about what they care about, we have started to forget that if we start to care about things too much, we get anxious and depressed about them when, and precisely because, they are outside our Circle of Influence – we can’t do anything about it except ‘raise awareness’ (ugh) or give money to charity.

So, with a sincere heart and clear conscience, I say this – put your heart and soul into everything in your Circle of Influence that serves you, your family, your workmates and the wider community. Do what you can about what you truly care about. Do it well.

But don’t get caught up in ‘circle of concern’ societal mourning, virtue-signalling, false grief and ‘thoughts and prayers’ – if you want to stay happy and focused.

 

Why are you distressing your friends?

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

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I’ve recently found that well-motivated people do like to spread the word through social media about issues that they find disturbing. This is all too frequently done through the inclusion of a video of whatever it is that causes this emotional upheaval. Societally the convention is that this is considered a ‘good thing’ because (they say) it ‘raises awareness’. The awareness it has raised in me is annoyance. Why so?

Well, consider it like this. If something makes me angry, upsets me, or even worse distresses me – why on earth do I want to visually inflict it on my friends and cause them anger, upset or distress?

The news channels, the newspapers, the charities and so on already provide this information copiously. There is rarely a day goes by without some bead news being visually communicated to me, often by a charity justifiably seeking funds. In their defence they do so with more measured video snippets because they believe that distress should not be inflicted by accident. If something IS likely to distress, they warn us.

(Have you noticed the repeated charity adverts saying the ‘situation is getting worse’? If that’s so, the money already sent isn’t working, so why send more? OK, that’s a bit tongue in cheek, but Michael Sheen is starting to get on my pip. See also an interesting article on why Ethiopia continues to breed an ever-larger population while still having no food and water.)

Anyway, social media users – if you like me enough to consider me your friend, here’s a suggestion.

If you really feel strongly about an issue, provide a link instead of a video, and let me decide if I want to see it. Provide it so that it doesn’t automatically upload the video e.g. put a gap between the . and the com. Don’t force upsetting scenes on me. Start a conversation about it with me, and see if I engage. If I am interested, let’s talk – if not, let’s move on. Or just use a poster raising the issue, one that doesn’t anger, upset or distress people, but just raises that awareness.

PLUS – and here’s just a thought – please don’t try to involve me unless you intend to do more than just spread the word. If you want to actually DO something, DO IT! Otherwise you’re just pointing and saying, “Oooh, look what they did!”

And that’s the Daily Mail’s responsibility.

In the end, it’s simply a case of your Circle of Concern v my Circle of Influence. If one or neither of us is willing and/or able to do something about the issue other than just shout, let’s waste no further time on it.

 

In the zone – in the Circle.

19 Monday Jan 2015

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“As long as we are working in our Circle of Concern, we empower the things within it to control us. We aren’t taking the proactive initiative necessary to effect positive change.” Stephen R Covey.

We all live in two circles, one lying within another. The outer circle is called the Circle of Concern and contains everything we know about and which has an influence on our lives in the sense that things happen in it that relate to our existence. It includes things like the weather, international politics, the economy and this morning’s commuter traffic. Within that circle is the smaller Circle of Influence, which contains the things over which we can exert a little or even a lot of control. It includes our behaviours, our home environment, the way we drive our cars. The Three Resolutions lie within the inner Circle of Influence.

CoI

 

The idea of successful living is to spend as much time in the smaller circle, dealing with things, events and circumstances over which you can exert influence – making things happen, and making them happen the way you want them to happen. At the same time, it means spending as little time as possible on the outer circle’s content because you can’t influence them. They are there but you can’t do anything about them.

Living in the Circle of Influence means not whining about things that you can’t do anything about, AND trying to do something about the things that irk you. Thinking like this, you can bring some of the ‘Concern’ circle into your ‘Influence’ circle through engagement in focus and protest groups, relevant industry bodies and so on. That is a great way to execute on the Third Resolution. But if you aren’t willing or able to get involved, don’t spend any more time dwelling on the matter.

The press – my favourite punch-bag – seems to exist solely to anger us by winding us up about things we are not willing to do anything about and which, in the main or most of the time, do not directly influence our time or our behaviour.

This morning, Oxfam has declared that soon, 1% of the Earth’s population will own 99% of the planet’s wealth. Sounds terrible, doesn’t it. You might be someone who is in a position to address this apparent inequity. Or you can think, “Well, that’s Oxfam’s job, to make us feel guilty about having money while others don’t.” The truth is probably somewhere in between your experience and the focus group’s perception. The objective of the newspaper headline, if not the Oxfam report itself, is to vilify the wealthy because they aren’t happily giving away all their money to those who can’t earn it – and to those who won’t.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about tax evasion, about rich people using clever accountants to help them avoid paying income tax. Not one of the reports ever questioned the arguable fact that in a perfect world we wouldn’t pay tax at all. It is, after all, legalised theft. The state decides how much of what you earn it is going to take, and you have one vote twice a decade to decide if (in the UK) 1/600th of the people stealing your money should keep on doing so. You have as much influence over what they spend it on. (Or you can leave the country – rarely a viable option and it just changes the tax regime in any case!)

I’m not suggesting tax is wholly evil, just wondering why no-one ever questions why a millionaire not paying £1,000 in tax (through evasion) is such a big story when s/he probably still pays £400,000 of every £1m s/he earns – s/he earned – because the government decided that they needed/wanted it. It’s not as if you get anything more for your money than someone who pays nothing at all, is it? They get the same roads, street lamps, defence – and they take credit for the international aid your work paid for, too.

And perhaps this reminds me of my point.

I can’t do a lot about the government’s tax raising regime, and my one vote won’t make any difference at all. So I shan’t spend any more time worrying about Oxfam’s report because I don’t care and cannot influence it, and the newspapers won’t change that.

I’ll focus today on what I can do something about. Writing this blog, 1,000 pages of another book, and looking after my family.

You do what you can do, and don’t worry about what you can’t.

Covey’s THIRD Circle

08 Saturday Mar 2014

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We are all familiar through one source or another with the concept of the Circle of Concern and the Circle of Influence. They were introduced by Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and in a nutshell they are explained thus: The Circle of Concern contains everything that concerns you but about which you either can’t do anything or you choose not to. Occasionally it contains what Charles R Hobbs (in his own pre-7 Habits book ‘TimePower’) would call

• things we think we can do nothing about, but we can and don’t, and
• things we know we can do something about, but won’t.

Let’s not even go there because we know we all have things that come under one of those headings.

The Circle of Influence contains the things which concern us, and about which and upon which we can exert some level of influence – we can do something about them, if we want to. Again, as Charles Hobbs might put it, the things we think we can do something about, and do.

For the life of me I cannot understand why everyone who quotes Dr Covey invariably stops there – at Circle 2, so to speak. Because (pardon the grammar) Dr Covey wrote about a third Circle.

In the follow-up to the 7 Habits he wrote that effective weekly goals are in our Circle of FOCUS. This Circle contains what we are concerned about, that are aligned with our Personal Mission Statement, and are timely – of the moment, now, urgent AND important. To quote Dr Covey, “To spend time and effort in any other Circle diminishes our effectiveness. When we operate in our Circle of Concern we basically waste effort on things we have no ability to control or affect. When we operate within our Circle of Concern we do some good, but what we do may be at the expense of something better. When we set and achieve goals that are in our Circle of Focus, we maximise the use of our time and effort.” (First Things First, p.151)

Remembering that ‘good’ is the enemy of ‘best’, perhaps a little more thought should be given to deciding, when we plan our weeks and set our goals, whether they lie in our Circle of FOCUS. And decide that if they do, then focus is what they’ll get.

Like you I have difficulty with such a focus, because life gets in the way. For example, in the middle of my writing this I was interrupted by a phone call, and that call was interrupted by another (no message on an unidentified number, thanks a bunch). As it was, the first call was in my Circle of Focus so no harm no foul.

Personal planning enables the Circle of Focus. Haphazard To-Do lists only expand the other two circles. Focus, people – FOCUS!