In an age obsessed with squeezing the most out of the hours, focus has quietly displaced productivity as the re-branded, more holistic approach.
It wouldn’t be pushing it that far to say that focus has become a kind of religion, with competing sects (or systems): people swear by their particular routines, apps, or tricks, whether it be GTD by David Allen, Pomodoro technique, apps that block notifications and social media, Remarkable tablets, or ten minute bursts of meditation between meetings. And then there is the whole other side of the focus religion, which in an attempt to be anti-productivity has replicated the same kind of fervor. Focus on your needs, focus on your loved ones (love people, use things, as the Minimalists love to say), focus on what matters.
Focus is the commandment of the modern day. And in a world with more and more competing for our attention, it makes sense. Similar to the concepts contained in the words ‘sacred’ and ‘temple’, focus is about delineating one space from another space: marking one area as important or sacred (the inside) and the other as extraneous (outside, common). Within the tyranny of freedom, focus is a kind of survival tool.
So how did this word, which has such specific modern associations, come out of the Latin Focus, which means “hearth, fireplace,” or figuratively, “home, family”?
One thread to follow is the association of importance or centrality. In ancient times, the hearth was the center of the home, the gathering place, because it was where food was cooked and where warmth came from. It was the heart of the home, and as such it was both the most critical part and also in a way the most vulnerable.
Another thread is to think about how the word came to be used for fire itself in post classical times. Fire is an incredibly singular thing. As I wrote in the post on fire, “we are drawn to fire because of the simplicity of its needs, and its un-self-conscious vacillation in form and magnitude based on what it is given. A single candle flame peacefully burns for as long as the wax remains, and then sputters out. The spark from a campfire ignites a small brush pile, and then a tree, and then tens of thousands, if not a million acres. Fire has a linear relationship between its needs and the results.”
Another way of putting this: fire is focused. It does not deviate or get distracted or try to be anything more or less than what it is.
A final way to think about this etymology and what we can learn from it: focus, like fire, must be tended to. While it is a natural phenomenon, it is not inherent, but rather something that is recognized, honored, and kept alive, to varying degrees of success. But there is a warning in this, too: put too much on a fire and you’ll smother it. Leave it for too long and it will burn out.
In this sense, maybe focus isn’t the myopic, extreme optimization we talk about in the modern day, but something far humbler, something whose scope we may not have nearly as much control over as we would like to believe.