Name Dropping and Focus

Just got back from Catalyst 08. It was a decent event for sure with a few great speakers and several solid ones. They have plenty of room for improvement and if I thought anyone who runs the event read my blog I'd mention those areas but the point is it was really good but if I had to pick between it and the Leadership Summit I'd go to the leadership summit every time.

Several of the speakers there had a tendency to do what came across as name dropping but I guess if you really are friends with "Pastor Awesome" and the two of you were camping together when he told you this story it's relevant to mention his name. But that's not the name dropping I'm talking about - mine has more to do with Facebook. When I first go into Facebook it was a great way to reconnect with some people I had lost contact with and wanted to reconnect with and then it became an easy way to stay in better contact with friends I don;t always see regularly. And then it became a way to collect names of people I knew 90% of the time and the other 10% of the time people who knew me. The problem is facebook doesn't know who I want to hear about and who I don't so it became a useless mess.

At Catalyst one of the speakers mentioned the whole idea of thinking about how we use technology, including facebook, and being intentional about it. I'm sure there are lots of other great things to use facebook for but I have decided that for me it will be a way to keep in contact with people I, for lack of a better term, truly care about. Folks from church, friends from wherever, and a handful of people that I just find interesting. In order to do that I have downsized my friend list significantly. I dumped about half my friends and continue to edit the list. Some of the people I dumped I didn't really know. Some of them are people I met once somewhere but will likely never see again, and some are folks I like plenty but am not close enough to to try and keep up with their life. This allows me to focus more on keeping up with the folks that are left.

Which leads to the lesson I'm learning and the question I'm asking. We have limited resources in life. Most of us get the idea of limited time and money. The smart ones also understand limited energy. But I think even fewer, myself included until recently, understand that we have limited focus. Putting more time and energy into less things (focus) yields a greater reward. I will not be putting any more time or energy into facebook but I will accomplish more "staying connected with friends" because I am connected to less friends. This has huge implications for church but it's a holiday so I'm not going to think it out for you here.
-What areas of your life, work, and relationships are you working on because you are being less effective and productive than you would like to be?
-What if instead of dumping more time, energy, and resources into this area you instead gave it more focus?
-How will you decide what to stop focusing on in order to free up some focus for this area (Jim Collins might call this your "Stop Doing" list)?