“how does one find and maintain the core focus of his/her business? or, to put it more broadly, “how do we come up with a good paradigm by which we determine which ideas to pursue and bring to fruition and which ideas, though they may be great ideas, do we let die or at least lie dormant will we actually get something done; to combat the habit of starting in on a bunch of good ideas, but none of them having anything to do with one another, and all of them ending up half-baked?”

in thinking more about this subject, i feel like i was able to boil these thoughts down into this idea of FOCUS/focus. what i mean by that is there are two ways that a business and the people in it must be focused in order to be successful.

the first is kind of on the macro level. i.e., how does your business decide what kind of projects/clients to pursue? how do you decide what you want your “niche” or “specialty” to be? do you even need to try to be specialized, or do you think you’d be better off as being more of a generalist? a few criteria that were batted around were money; does this work pay enough to make the business viable? do the people pay on time? passion; do you enjoy the work or is it something you’d rather not do? chemistry; are the people you’re doing the project for/with people you work well with and do the appreciate/understand the value of what you’re doing?

the second is micro, the day to day of actually doing the projects. what method do you use to stay on task? do you need to shut off the internet for a certain amount of hours each day? do you need to make a to do list? do you need to have a quiet library like atmosphere or do you need some music to get the juices flowing?

you’ll notice i didn’t answer any of these questions. one really needs to find and execute solutions that are personalized for them. not everyone works the same way. i hope that these thoughts can help you reflect and better understand what it is you really want to do and how you can get it done.