Focus!

Maintaining your focus can be a tough goal to achieve in today's world. There are so many distractions begging you to look at the shiny rather than finishing what you are working on. The TV, smartphones, social media, games, books, movies, that tuna salad in the fridge with the mold starting to grow on it...  mmm  tuna salad.

I am not going to write about how do maintain your focus because that has been done to death. The stick that was used on that dead horse broke a while ago. I do love me some Vitamin B, and I would recommend it to anyone who is having a problem maintaining focus.

What I want to talk about is how important it is to maintain focus in what you are currently doing. With all of these distractions, it is very easy to only partially pay attention. When you do that you are doing a disservice to whatever you are doing at the time. It's going to take longer to do, you are going to make more mistakes, and the overall quality is not going to be as good as it could be. This makes babies and puppies cry. Don't make babies and puppies cry.

I love to play poker, and unless you like to lose a lot of money then you spend a lot of time folding. The goal is to make money over a longer period of time if you play the right way. You might lose 50 hands in a row by folding, but that one hand you win can make it worth it. I was spending the time in between hands writing, but now I have decided to stop doing that. The quality of the writing and my poker play suffered as a result of trying to do both. I inflicted unneeded pain on my characters and wallet. Now I inflict needed pain on my characters in more creative ways. My wallet is thanking me as well.

So go forth ye unwashed masses. Share your tale of how maintaining your focus has helped you in the comments while texting, tweeting, and listening to a Taylor Swift song. This blog post has been brought to you by the letter F and the number Pi.