“Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: I don't much care where.

The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.

Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere.

The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.”

That is the famous dialogue between Alice and the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carrol.

And it’s a great illustration of what happens when you don’t know what is important to you and where you want to go. You’re going to go get somewhere and that somewhere is probably going to be a place you never wanted to go to. 

This week, I’ll share with you why developing your Areas of Focus is so important. 

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Script | 374

Hello, and welcome to episode 374 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

So, why are your Areas of Focus important? Well, in a nutshell, they give you direction. They help you to prioritise your days and weeks and give you purpose. 

Without them, you’ll end up helping someone else achieve their goals, more often than not, in exchange for money, only to discover you’re health is shot to pieces and you’ve spent your forty years of working life miserably giving away five days a week to something you hated doing. 

 A bit harsh, I know, but if you’ve read the book The Top five Regrets of The Dying by Bronnie Ware, you’ll know that the number one reason given was “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” 

It’s your areas of focus that will allow you to live a life true to yourself because by developing your areas of focus, you’ll learn what is important to you and what is not. 

And the second reason? I wish I hadn't worked so hard. 

When you don’t know what is important and what is not, you will work too hard. Everything becomes important, and that means you work long hours and at weekends, missing out on your children growing up and enjoying the best years of your life doing the things you want to do. 

I’m pretty sure that’s not how you want your life to work out. 

So with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Julie. Julie asks, hi Carl, I hear you mention knowing what’s important to you a lot, yet I really don’t know what’s important. I’m under pressure at work and I have two teenagers at home. I feel my life is being pushed and pulled by everyone but myself. What can I do to create some boundaries in my life? 

Hi Julie, thank you for your question. 

It’s when we feel lost and out of sorts that our Areas of Focus can help to bring back some peace to our lives. 

Our areas of focus are focused on our needs and wants. And because of that, people feel it’s an indulgence to even consider spending time on developing them. That’s particularly the case when we have a young family and we’ve allowed our work to dominate our lives. 

The first book I ever read on time management and productivity was Hyrum Smith’s Ten natural Laws and time and Life Management, and around the first quarter of that book is spent on developing what Hyrum Smith calls your governing values. 

Your governing values are the values by which you live your life by. With these, we will all be different. For some, being a good mother or father will be their most important value, for others, it might be building a successful business.

Now, when I read that book I was around eighteen or nineteen and that part of the book washed over me. I was young, I believed I was immortal and I could do anything I wanted to do. I didn’t have time to think about my “governing values”. 

Yet, with age, came wisdom and around my late twenties I began to see the importance of having a set of values to guide me. 

That’s when I gave myself a couple of weekends to write out my governing values. Funnily enough, as I look through my old Franklin Planners from that era, I can see that the values I wrote down then are not far away from how I define my Areas of Focus today. 

it’s these areas that give you a direction and a purpose. They help you with prioritising your days and weeks and give you a solid foundation on which to build your goals. 

For example, I used to be a smoker. Throughout my twenties and thirties I’s smoke around twenty cigarettes a day. I found it relaxing, a great way to step away from my work and to think. Yet, I knew that by continuing to smoke I was violating my area of health and fitness. 

I was going to the gym and running, I was eating healthily, but i was destroying all that by continuing the smoke. As I got older, the pressure inside me to quit something I enjoyed doing grew stronger. it eventually reached a point where I had to quit. 

Every time I reviewed my areas of focus, I had that niggling voice reminding me that the vision I had for my later life—being able to travel the world running marathons, exploring places like Mount Kilimanjaro and the Rocky Mountains would be just a pipe dream because I would be spending my later life in and out of hospital. 

And so, I set the goal to quit smoking. Now for anyone who has gone through the process of quitting smoking, you’ll know it’s one of the toughest things to do. It took me two years to finally quit. Yet, the effort was worth it. 

Quitting gave me a sense of accomplishment, a realisation that I could do anything if I put my mind to it and it was compatible with what I felt was important. 

Yet without a set of principles—something your areas of focus will give you—things like stopping something that is slowly killing you or staying in a career that is draining you and leaving your feeling depressed and unhappy—will never occur to you. They will be placed on what Brian Tracey calls, “Someday Island”, a place where nothing happens because you’re waiting for “someday”. 

another illustration of this was when i joined a law firm. I had spent six years training to be a lawyer. I worked hard, to get my legal qualifications, yet when I began working in a law firm, I quickly realised I’d made a huge mistake. 

I hated being stuck behind a desk eight or none hours a day. 

Prior to working in an office, all my jobs had involved a lot of moving around. I began my career in hotel management, where I spent all day running around a large building dealing with all sorts of issues. I’d sometimes be on reception helping to check people out, then I’s be in the restaurant serving lunch. It was fun, physically exhausting, yet incredibly fulfilling. 

Then I went into car sales. And again, my days were largely spent running around a showroom and forecourt talking with customers. 

Suddenly, I’m chained to a desk and within six months I’d gained 20 pounds in weight, I was unhappy, and felt trapped. It was as if I had been sent to open prison where I was expected to be in one place for eight to nine hours a day Monday to Friday. it was horrible. 

So, I quit and came to Korea. a decision that turned out to be the best decision I’ve ever made.

Yet, when i told my friends and family I was quitting the law firm and going to teach English in Korea, they thought I was mad. Why was I quitting a potentially lucrative career to go and do something I knew nothing about? 

Yet, it was my areas of focus that told me what I needed to do. staying in that legal job violated my career and business area. I was trapped in an industry that held firm to a tried and tested career path. I didn’t want that constraint. I wanted a lot more freedom to help pe