When Strange and Difficult Times began, almost fifteen years ago, my primary focus was on finding that one jungle vine to swing out to safety on -- so I focused my energies on finding a job in my degree fields. After a long bot of that, I split my focus between the survival of the difficult spots in which I found myself and preserving the mechnism so that either independent work or employments in the fields would be possible after the difficulties had been surmounted.
Now, many years later, I've come to realize that anything I hope to achieve needs to be an active concern while the difficulties persist. So it's a triple focus, really -- the search for regular work in the fields, the surviving of the difficulties presently at hand, and the independent work that might turn out to be the central work of life.
It's taken a long time to make that turn, but I don't think I would have acted differently in the earlier times if I had been a wiser beast. There is a logic to each circumstance; the trick is to keep both the awareness of the actual present circumstance and the integrity of the logic associated with it as clear as possible.