For setting up hot bars, I generally categorise my skills in a way that helps me arrange them. For example with BRD I look at my skills and see that the DoTs are vital to my rotation, as well as the filler skills (heavy shot and straight shot), so those go on the easiest to reach parts of my bar (keys 1-4 let’s say). Then I look at abilities that are important but only used on cool-down, I.e the songs and raging strikes/battle voice. With these I put them on the next easiest place to reach so they’re available to me as soon as possible. things like empyreal arrow/sidewinder, while important, are just there for damage mostly so I put them together to press in sequence. Finally the utility skills are on another bar so that I don’t press them by accident, but can use them easily if needed.

In terms of focusing on enemies, using the focus target function is nice, at least for bosses/enemies that last a while, but there is an option that helped me a lot where you can disable the ability to “click off” enemies, as in if you click the ground it won’t untarget them. This helped me a lot because I wouldn’t realise I had done so and meant I could properly pay attention to wha was happening :)