Pick ONE focus to transform your business

Yesterday (Monday morning), I flipped over my weekly desk calendar for it to reveal in big type that it is in fact Week 43. Which suddenly then showed me we have less than 10 weeks left of 2025.

Naturally, this kick started a 50 minute panic of me finding my FigJam board where I’d mapped out all my goals for the year, realising there’s simply no way for me to tick them all off, and beginning to delete pictures off my vision board. Thankfully, I then spent a further 10 minutes pulling myself together and undoing any changes I’d made.

Visual representation of me this morning

It’s easy to fall into the trap of pushing everything back to January at this time of the year. Q4 is already hectic enough as it is without dedicating time to actually focus on your own business, and it seems so close that actually achieving anything in the last 2 months of the year can appear borderline unrealistic.

But in ten whole weeks, you can build something significant.

At any other point of the year, I work with clients over less than ten weeks to:

• Redefine and relaunch their services

• Design and launch an entirely new website

• Create and kickstart a full business strategy

In fact I have clients booked in who I will do this for over the next few weeks. So why does that suddenly seem so impossible for my own business when it reaches the countdown weeks?

Prioritisation.

I looked at my goal board for the year and saw 4 very sizeable goals I’ve not yet fully met. And realistically it is impossible for me to now achieve all 4 of those goals this year, alongside the client work I already have scheduled. But that doesn’t mean I can’t tick off at least one of them.

The pressure to finish the year strong often turns into a frenzy for founders of half started projects or a waterfall of pushed back ideas. But rather than trying to somehow increase our ambition, we (read ‘I’), need to instead increase our focus. To pick one singular goal we can commit to fully, to truly end our year on a high.

This one thing is different for every business, but it could be to:

• Design and launch a waitlist for a new offer that’s launching in January.

• Make this your biggest Black Friday yet.

• Start the newsletter you’ve been planning all year.

Ten weeks might not be long enough to make everything happen. But it’s definitely long enough to make something happen. And that something can be quite significant.

Attention Residue

I am the queen of buying, but never using, planners. If there’s anything that sells me the dream of productivity, I am first in line. One of my most recent purchases was a ‘project pad’ which is an aesthetically laid out desk pad allowing you to write out details of the different projects you have going on, sub tasks, deadline dates, and a priority list. It’s A3 in size and on really nice heavyweight, cream paper. To my own annoyance, I use this planner by ripping out sheets, turning it over to the blank side, and drawing out my own to do lists and scattered notes. Then first prioritising hoovering, a weekly food shop, or batch cooking lunches.

I’ve always been the same and have forever had the same messy approach to prioritising. Technically there’s nothing wrong with this as it works for me and I always hit my client deadlines. But I love the idea of being more aesthetic with my planning so I can at least feel like I am in more control, and maybe post those pretty colour coordinated planners on my Instagram stories like all the founders I’m in awe of.

The queen of aesthetic planners that I would love to be. Credit to Passion Planner (definitely not mine).

I digress.

This led me to googling for the millionth time *why am I like this and how can I actually get myself to use the pack of 20 paster coloured highlighters I also bought last month?*

And Google led me to the world of attention residue. This is the concept of how “having multiple tasks and obligations on our mind splits our attention in a way that reduces overall performance” (Sophie Leroy). “If you have attention reside, you are basically operating with part of your cognitive resources being busy, and that can have a wide range of impacts”.

There’s now various interpretations of exactly how shifting between different tasks impact our productivity, but all professors agree with even when your attention is shifted to a few task, there is a “residue” that remains with the prior task that negatively impacts your performance on both.

This might not fully answer my pretty planning questions, but it did allow me to reflect on how I plan my time for the remaining weeks of the year. If I try to switch my attention between too many tasks, I’m not going to be able to give any of them 100% of my focus. So if I want to make a real impact with my goals, I need to pick just one to focus on for the rest of the year.

So how do you pick one focus?

Choosing just one core goal for the next ten weeks is uncomfortable. It means accepting you won’t finish everything this year, and pushing back ideas that still excite you.

But try to see your attention like a spotlight. If you spread it across five projects, everything’s dimly let. If you concentrate on one, you can really brighten that goal.

When picking which goal to put in the spotlight, start by reflecting on your year so far to get a clearer picture on your current landscape. Reflect on:

· What’s currently working, that could be doubled down on and grown even more?

· What’s an opportunity, that if you started now, could really set you up for success in 2026?

· Where have you seen traction that you’ve not been able to fully capitalise on?

· What’s not working, that you could replace or dive into to understand better?

You don’t want your core focus to be something that’s not going to move the needle. So you need to look at ideas from all angles of your business to understand what’s really going to have the most significant impact with your focus.

Once you have a list of possible priorities, you can then begin to narrow this down. You can filter our your ideas by thinking of:

· Impact: If you completed this by December, how would your business look different in January?

· Probability: Can you realistically deliver this in the next ten weeks with the time and resources you have?

· Simplicity: Can you describe your goal in one clear sentence? Are you honestly clear on what this goal is all about and the reason for it?

My forever advice is that once you have that one thing, make it more specific. Really challenge yourself and set an actionable goal that you can clearly tick or not tick off in ten weeks time. For example:

“I want to launch my new signature offer and market it to fill five January spaces.”

“I want to launch two different Q4 promotions to help me sell over 200 of my before Christmas.”

“I want to plan and launch a newsletter by the middle of November, so I can utilise Black Friday sales to further grow my email marketing list to at least 50 people.”

When you have one really clear focus, everything else will fall into place*. You’ll know what to focus on with marketing, what your to-do list priorities are, and whether you’re on track to achieve that goal.

Setting yourself up for success

*Importantly however, everything else will only fall into place if you plan for it to.

You can’t just define your goal and hope for the best. You need to map out how you’re going to achieve that and set a series of rules for yourself to commit to the plan.

I like to use my Plot -> Map -> Shape -> Act framework whenever I’m approaching planning to make sure I look at the plan in it’s entirety.

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Plot

Always start with the purpose of the goal. Why this focus and who is it for? You want to make sure you truly connect with your goal so that you’ll have the motivation to want to achieve it.

If your one goal is to launch a new service, what’s driving that decision?

Research like this shows if we link intention to action by specifying the when, where, and how, we are far more likely to stick with our goals. Which is the reason behind me being a big advocate for starting with your why. And when things will undoubtedly get even more chaotic as we get deeper into Q4, every extra grain of commitment will help us to stay on track.

Map

Then you’ll want to plan out what your route to success looks like for this focus. Ideally in sequence. This stage can look very different depending on what your goal is and how you work best, but some of my best tips include:

· Define the outcome: What will “done” look like? The more specific you can be, the easier it is to tick off, or not tick, the task.

· Reverse engineer: If you don’t know where to start then work backwards from the outcome. What must be true four weeks out for you to hit the goal? Two weeks out? Tomorrow? Before you know it you’ll have your timeline.

· Phase the work: I’m a big fan of breaking things down, and for goals I generally attribute phases. Chunks such as ‘planning’, or ‘launch’ that help me to mentally or physically tick off broader groups of tasks so I know I am progressing.

· Block your time: I may not use a colour coded calendar (yet), but I am the queen of time blocking. For example, I have two hours every Monday morning blocked to write out my weekly Substack article, as one of my core goals is to commit to publishing each Tuesday. If you can commit to a dedicated time block every week to spend moving yourself closer to your goal, it’s much easier to then utilise that time rather than kidding yourself you’ll have a sudden quiet afternoon to spend on it.

Shape

The crucial step between having a plan and actioning it is knowing where that plan is supposed to show up, and what that looks like.

I am assuming 99% of business goals in this last push of the year will involve something being physically or digitally created. Be that marketing materials, a new website sales page, an internal presentation deck. And how you present this matters. Especially if you’re putting something out for customers, the consistency of your brand visual identity have a direct impact on your perceived credibility and value.

As with everything about your brands visual identity, you want to reduce “processing fluency,” which is “a cognitive bias in which our liking of something is directly linked to how easily our brains find it to think about, mentally process, and understand.” In the context of your goal, this might look like reflecting on making sure:

· Your offer landing page, social posts, and email copy all reflect the same tone and visual direction.

· Your messaging connects your one focus with your purpose.

· All touchpoints (content, booking link, onboarding) reflect your new direction clearly.

Act

Then finally it’s all about pulling it together. Once you have your goal defined, how you’re going to achieve it, and what it should look like, ‘act’ is really all about just getting started.

And whilst you’re setting yourself up for this to be the simplest step, it’s often also the hardest when it seems like you’re already spinning a million plates.

If it does seem overwhelming, then try to only focus on those first initial steps you’ve mapped and don’t look at the list in its’ entirety. Make sure you celebrate ticking each individual item off, no matter how small. And plan for set-backs so that you aren’t too hard on yourself if you have to move things round.

So if your calendar has also just flipped over to week 43 and you’re staring at an overly ambitious goal board, welcome to the club. But rather pushing them all back to January, let’s commit to picking just one that we can give our full focus to over these remaining weeks.

Plot it. Map it. Shape it. Act on it. Then let January arrive to find you already in motion.

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