The Tuesday Focus Check (Memorial Day Edition)
This one’s a day late. Monday belongs to something more important.
Memorial Day is the one day I slow down and sit with the names. Not the idea of service or the concept of sacrifice. The actual people. The guys I knew who didn’t come home. The families who set a place at a table that will never be filled again. If you’re carrying anyone like that today, I hope you got some time to hold them in your hearts.
We don’t take that lightly here. Everything we build at Focus Now is built on the foundation those people died defending: the right to choose who you become, how you spend your attention, what kind of life you actually live. That’s not a small thing. And it’s worth remembering where it came from.
This week’s focus check
The open loops dump. 2 minutes. Before you do anything else today.
Your brain is not a storage system. It’s a processing system. But most of us are running it like a hard drive, loading it with every unfinished task, pending conversation, and half-formed worry, and then wondering why we can’t focus.
There’s a psychological principle behind this called the Zeigarnik effect. Your brain keeps unfinished tasks active in working memory until they’re resolved or offloaded. That hum you feel when you sit down to work, the background noise, the pull in 6 directions at once, that’s your brain running open loops. And it can only close them by getting them out of your head and onto something external.
Here’s the practice. Grab a piece of paper or open a blank doc. Set a timer for 2 minutes. Write every open loop you’re holding right now: the email you haven’t sent, the conversation you need to have, the thing you said you’d do that you haven’t, the worry you keep returning to. Don’t sort or prioritize. Just get it out. When the timer goes off, stop.
You’re not solving anything. You’re clearing the RAM. And what happens after you do it is noticeable: the background noise quiets, and you can actually put your full attention on the thing in front of you instead of everything else at once.
That’s the gap. The space between what’s coming at you and how you choose to respond. Right now most of us are living with that gap nearly closed because there’s so much running in the background. Tomorrow we’re going into exactly how to develop it. Which brings me to this.
Live webinar tomorrow: developing the gap
Wednesday, May 27 at 12pm ET
Viktor Frankl wrote that between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space is our power to choose. Will and I have spent years building practical tools for finding and expanding that space, and tomorrow we’re teaching the whole framework live.
We’re going to cover how that gap gets compressed under stress, why most focus advice misses this completely, and what you can actually do to widen it in real-time so that you’re responding instead of reacting across every high-stakes moment in your day.
It’s free. It’s one hour. And it’s the core of everything we teach.
Register for Wednesday’s webinar
Right after the webinar: the A2A course opens at 40% off
Our Awareness to Action course is live now at full price. For 48 hours immediately following tomorrow’s webinar, we’re opening it at 40% off the annual membership and a significant discount off the lifetime fee. That window closes on Friday at 1pm ET.
The course is 12 modules built around the exact framework we’ll be teaching tomorrow: awareness, attention, and action. Videos, guided meditations, resources, live calls with Will and me, and a full year of access. Everything you need to actually build this as a practice, not just understand it as a concept.
If you want to start now at full price, it’s at focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course. Or wait until after the webinar and get it at the best price we’re offering. Either way, come to the webinar tomorrow. It stands on its own.
Register for Wednesday’s webinar
Today, take a breath for the ones who can’t.
See you tomorrow.
Jon
Men Talking Mindfulness is hosted by Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider.
New episodes every week. Search Men Talking Mindfulness on any podcast platform.
Focus Now Training: focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course