A new year is upon us and so I am inclined, like most, to reflect a little bit on the past and make some adjustments moving forward into the future. First, some observations about the past.

Time Creep

My makeup naturally makes me want to learn about anything and everything. I buy lots of books, read a slew of blog posts, website and magazine articles, and am constantly trying to learn more about topics that I find interesting.

Over the past few years I’ve noticed a similar trend with my hobbies as well. I will latch onto something new and add it into my life. About three years ago my wife and I discovered we both really enjoyed baseball and started watching and attending Rangers games regularly. A couple of years ago I bought a 1994 Mazda Miata for a few thousand dollars to tinker on and enjoy driving. Last year I took up cycling. This is in addition to longstanding hobbies of mine: watching college basketball and motorsports on TV, reading good theology books, and cooking.

Professionally, my life shows the same trend. When I decided to reduce my hours at the church to 10 hours a week and start my own business, I had a blank slate before me. While I knew that, generally, I wanted to help people use the web to market their businesses and organizations, I had no particular focus, yet. I have had about fifty different ideas in the last few months about how to focus my business and specialize in a particular area, but I haven’t committed to any one of them. I’m building websites from scratch for some clients, search engine optimization for others, email marketing for another, website redesign and optimization for others, all while being open to whatever comes my way.

Given that my days still only have 24 hours in them, I have noticed over the last few years that as I have added things into my life, I have not taken many things away. I’m not overwhelmed, exactly, but I do feel like I am lacking focus in many areas. I’m flopping around a bit, and I don’t much like it.

So, some adjustments in 2012 are in order.

Focus

I want 2012 to be a year when I focus. The key to succeeding is not in choosing what to focus upon, but in deciding what to cut away.

Tomorrow, I’ll post about how I decided on what to focus on and what to cut away.

In the meantime, how do you decide what to devote yourself to? How do you decide what to cut out?