It never ends, does it?
If you write out your projects — work, school, personal, or otherwise — you’ll quickly discover a never-ending sea of things to do.
Further, you now need to juggle your options. How do you figure out which is the most pressing, while hoping the rest will patiently wait?
And of course, new inputs come in. Whether a new project arrives at work, the dog ate something they shouldn’t have, or there’s a new comedy special (that’ll just take a minute to watch the beginning of…)
However we approach it,
The “Work of Work” can feel impossible.
Yet, people seem to do it all the time. They do the work in front of them, while returning calls and emails on time, hang out with friends and family, and even enjoy the evenings. (The nerve of them…)
Even a wandering mind, diving deep into some things while easily losing sight of other matters, can find ways to guide and nourish their worlds.
But others still struggle. Tripping over one system, method, and app after the next, building and re-building in hopes that “this time it will stick”.
But what if we compared it to learning an instrument?
When one person practices, they find it to be torturous, another bitter chore eating into their day. They quickly drop it and try to find another hobby, another exciting brief beginning followed by a plateau, drifting into inevitable boredom.
Meanwhile, someone else finds practice rejuvenating, a sense of challenge meeting them right where they are, offering a ready and continual path of mastery.
What gives?
A key difference between them is the structures that support them.
The Work of Work needs to be simple to maintain. Whatever system we build, when done well, should help us feel *supported*. Struggling to keep it all together is destined to fail.
But how do we do that when the Work of Work seems so complex?
The Waves of Focus Methodology posits this: we can guide ourselves by fostering healthy relationships between our temporal selves. Past, Present, and Future selves must somehow acknowledge and even honor each other’s experiences and agency.
It is not a simple practice, but the exercises exist. Techniques involve the practice of making visits, learning how to smoothly begin and end matters, crafting our environments, and more.
But already that can seem overwhelming. Of course, any solid system will have some degree of pulleys and levers to deal with the nuances of our lives.
How it manages them, how it manages the Work of Work, is the name of the game.
Waves of Focus does exactly this with a “Guide”.
In short, a Guide is a structure that naturally calls these practices without the need to go through some binge organizing process. Whether by way of pen and paper or in a digital space, we gradually grow a Guide, unique to ourselves, to nurture a sense of genuine trust between our past, present, and future selves.
Meanwhile, a Guide naturally prompts the decisions, in the moment, that would be needed to maintain itself over time.
It’s not a magical entity, just like showing up to the piano doesn’t automatically make us musicians. But having a piano there, easily accessible, with the rhythms of our days supporting our time there, and perhaps even the tiniest tendril of play looking for light,… a path to mastery begins to open.
Rather than fight ourselves to show up at the piano, we look forward, finding music that we’d like to play.
Instead of fighting our systems, we start finding things we’d like to do, discover, and begin blazing our paths there.
– Kourosh
PS The Waves of Focus is currently going strong at over 50 active members. If you’d like to join a cohort of wonderful people helping each other to find steadier waters and even getting to where they want to go, consider joining.
