Lesson Four: How Life of Focus Works

On Monday, Cal Newport and I are reopening Life of Focus for a new session. Before we do that, I’d like to take this chance to explain how Life of Focus works—since it is a little different from what most people have come to expect from online courses—and share how I think about designing courses to encourage behavior change.

The classic course is all about providing information. There’s a syllabus with a list of content; a bunch of lectures where the ideas, facts and concepts are conveyed; and finally, there’s an exam to test if you remember everything you were taught.

There’s nothing wrong with this model for many subjects. In many fields, information is what’s missing, so taking some time to learn is the best action.

However, from nearly two decades developing online courses, I’ve often been disappointed with how the classic approach to structuring a course translates to action. The problem is that a lot of information, on its own, rarely translates to concrete behavioral change. A course on nutrition, for instance, will give you tons of useful concepts and ideas about eating better—but it may not actually change how you eat, which is the ultimate goal of most people.

When Cal Newport and I started designing Life of Focus, we knew this was going to be a potential issue in our course. Cal had recently published Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. Most of our prospective students had either read these books or followed Cal’s blog or podcast and were already familiar with his calls for increasing focus in work and life.

We knew that people attending the course didn’t need more exhortations to turn off their email when doing deep work or lessons about the neuroscience of attentional processing. Instead, we designed the course to guide them through specific steps to create new working behaviors, and to have follow-through so those behaviors could become lifelong habits.

The Format of an Action-Centered Course

As a result of this, Life of Focus (and my more recent course, Foundations) follows a different model than what we typically think of as a course.

To start, the course is organized into three monthly challenges. Rather than putting the lessons first with the homework as an optional bonus (let’s face it, most people who take online courses rarely do the assignments), we put taking action to improve our focus first, and then provide regular lessons to remind and reinforce those actions as they are already underway.

The three challenges for Life of Focus are:

• Tracking your deep work hours
• Conducting a digital declutter, and
• Engaging in a focus-building project to make or learn something new.

As another inversion to the typical course format, we start each month with a guided worksheet. This helps students come up with step-by-step actions they can take to begin each month-long challenge with the best footing. Only once students start working on the challenge do we start providing lessons to fine-tune, remind, motivate and redirect students as they go through the month.

On top of this, we add a lot of direct community support and coaching so students can quickly address sticking points as they come up, before they fall off the challenge or get discouraged.

In brief, the format of Life of Focus is more like a personal trainer at the gym than a university class on exercise science. By encouraging action from the get-go, the lessons and feedback support behavioral changes as you’re making them.

While Cal and I were unsure how such a novel course format would work with students, we have been pleasantly surprised, and many students have told us Life of Focus is their favorite course they’ve taken with us. Many students have even taken the course multiple times since they first enrolled, treating second and third passes as a chance to further refine their process using the three-month structure it provides.

Life of Focus Opens Monday

I wanted to explain this course format because, in running this course and others over the last few years, I’ve forgotten how different this approach can be for many people. It can be hard to explain why joining a structured three-month program to improve focus is different than simply reading a book or listening to podcasts. But our focus on taking action first, and then supporting that action with learning, is designed to help our students make real changes—not just think about making them.



I hope you’ll join us on Monday so you can see it for yourself!