At the most macro scale, focusing on where we are in life and where we’d like to go next can help us make calendar-level decisions. Thinking at this scale can also help us make choices about what habits and rituals to implement and maintain, and can help us notice when our long-term focus is misdirected.

A level down from that scale, we put those larger conceptions into practice by ensuring the stuff we do day-to-day actually moves us in the right direction (for our definition of “right direction”).

We might notice, for instance, that while we’d like to spend more time with family or invest more of ourselves in our painting practice, we instead spend half the day in front of the TV or doomscrolling. Reorganizing our schedules and reallocating our resources so they’re spent on the right things can help with that, as can identifying and addressing pain points that regularly nudge us toward the wrong behaviors.

Another level down, we find the moment-to-moment stuff.

This is where we catch ourselves before we start scrolling, because we actually want to be reading a book or fully engaging with a friend. This is where we make the choice to work on the book we’re writing instead of playing video games (even though the video games sound really, really good at that moment).

Each of these decisions is small unto itself, but in aggregate these choices, these exercises of willpower (or lack thereof), determine whether we’re capable of reaching our higher-tier goals. It can be painful to tear ourselves away from our many and beloved distraction-spigots, because these things are optimized to keep us hooked, and to keep our focus fuzzed into a calming blur.

If we can push past those inclinations and make more intentional decisions on a regular basis, though, our focused moments scale up into focused days, months, and years.

This relationship between individual decisions and the totality of our lives is the important part to remember.

We are the sum of teensy choices, and we will be more or less likely to accomplish the things we’d like to accomplish depending on how those itty-bitty internal battles play out.

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