So I went to a Chinese restaurant the other day, and the smile on my face as I walked out was more related to my fortune than to my full stomach.  How appropriate.  And how interesting that the fortune cookies always seem to promise riches, love, and prosperity.

But this post isn’t about fortune cookies, it’s about focus. Focus is the reason the fortune cookie actually left me with a smile.  Since I started my part-time job in February, I have had no choice but to focus in my business.  And with this enforced focus have come results.  My online income has doubled since February, and Analytics and AdSense say that it is because of the time and effort I have been putting into Argentina’s Travel Guide.

That time has come at the expense of my other projects, but that is how it has to be.  Focus is one of the biggest challenges the entrepreneur personality-type faces because we love to have our fingers in as many pies as we can handle.  But that’s not the way to finish a pie.  Eating a whole pie takes commitment, and hard work, and focus.  (Ok, I think I’ve carried this analogy far enough.)

And it’s not that entrepreneurs don’t know this. Entrepreneurs all over the web write about the importance of focus, at length.  The hard part is following your own advice, because of that exciting new project that always seems to come up.

I don’t have any great insight on how to get yourself to focus more on your projects.  For me, it’s been a question of 1) introducing serious time constraints, 2) choosing a primary focus, and 3) writing down goals.  The importance of written goals has been pounded into all of us, though I wonder how many take it seriously.  Right now, mine are posted on my wall, next to my monitor.  And now, let me put them here for good measure:

Three-Month Goals

• There are 1,000 unique daily visitors to Argentina’s Travel Guide


• ATG cashflow has increased 10-fold


• ATG is largely user-generated and has the seeds of a community

So if you wondered why Flee the Cube is suffering from a dearth of activity lately, now you know why.  Not that it hasn’t been weighing on my conscience - I have to admit that I feel an obligation to the community and to my advertisers, not to mention to myself.  And because of that, I have a few ideas about how to keep things moving over here, which I plan to implement (as long as they don’t detract too much from my focus).  So stay tuned.