This truth becomes particularly relevant when you face boredom and its many disguises in the journey of getting better at focus.

One defining feature of boredom is the discomfort it brings; one defining feature of the mind is its cleverness at fleeing discomfort.

Armed with your focus list and your strategy for tackling it, you might come upon the next item—say, dancing—and feel, as you sink into the couch after a long day, a gut-wrenching revulsion at the very suggestion of moving. But the revulsion presents not just as revulsion but as boredom, tiredness, a restlessness pointing to how you ought to be doing the next project on your focus list—dancing—but "can't" because “It’s now 4:00am. Office work starts in 2 hours. You’re literally already working on your blog post. There’s no light. There’s no water.”

A foggy mind takes this restless direction at face value. A clear mind—perhaps after an exercise of writing out thought onto a page—sees it for what it is: distraction. Or, put simply, a failure to say yes to focus

What tends to happen is that engaging with focus and its implications almost always raises resistance. For you committed to focus, the response has be not a fleeing, but maintaining a grip on focus.

Where you may find yourself begin to falter is in expecting that “1, 2, 3, Focus!” will deliver focus.

Take the example of dancing again: before the activity of dancing arrives, there are countless preambles that need to give way—getting out of bed, showering, picking clothes, choosing a song, etc. This kind of activities can be called facilitators—activities (outside a core activity) that ease or enable execution of a core activity. At the point of engagement with focus, any activity that does not ease, enable, or support the task at hand is a distraction. 

Entry points into focus begin at facilitators that lead you into it. Lean into the facilitators and arrive at focus. 

Of course, situations will arise where you must handle something seemingly outside the focus task at hand. Here, clarity tends to reveal the truth: does this different activity clear the way for focus, or is it simply noise dressed up as urgency? More often than not, its noise. And when it's not, a simple pegging of the focus item at hand to a future time tends to bring calm from the trust that you are still saying yes to focus.