Chapter 5
Focus-Wise in the Age of Distraction
Your people will zone out during meetings, text their spouses, and check Facebook at their desks. Human beings will always be distracted. The secret is learning how to engineer distraction to your organization's benefit.
That doesn't mean hiring “expert” multitaskers or demanding focus savants. It means encouraging and equipping employees to be focus-wise.
And we have to be realistic about what's possible in the constantly connected workplace. Over and over, I hear leaders equate distraction with theft: “If you check social media during work, you're stealing.” Do they apply the same logic the other way around?
Life intrudes on work just as work intrudes on life (often to the advantage of an organization).
As leaders, we need to recognize the glut of commitments and obligations each employee faces at work and outside of it. Your project manager has a crucial meeting at 4 PM—someone will have to pick up her son from soccer practice. Three e-mails are marked “urgent,” but which one really is? Did she remember to DVR the season finale of her favorite show?
A well-balanced person learns to wear many hats. But eventually one of those hats will demand to be worn when another ball cap is already in place. In other words, the more responsibilities, the more chance of bleed-through.
Bleed-through isn't necessarily bad. For example, if your people can text you at home with a quick question, they gain the freedom to keep working and you can avoid staying late at the office. This creates overall efficiency.
But bleed-through can work the other way as well. Your spouse may feel justified in texting you all day at work. Endless exchanges, of course, breed inefficiency. Two ball caps worn in opposite directions might make you look like Sherlock Holmes, but they won't give you his powers of deduction. Distraction isn't a test of employee loyalty or willpower—if it was, we'd all fail.
Today's constantly connected world is like a complex ocean with swells, currents, and winds. And we are all stuck in the thick of it. Each condition can spell danger or opportunity and cannot be controlled. But you have the power to help your people navigate these choppy waters. The question is: Will you give them a raft or a sailboat?
The Raft
A client of mine appeared on maybe the most unnerving reality TV show ever. The premise: You float on a raft for a week in the Bermuda Triangle with a person chosen specifically to grate on your nerves.
Claustrophobia on the open seas!
A raft gives you no control. It just bobs along at the mercy of its surroundings until someone rescues you.
We live in an age of personalized automation, from Amazon recommendations to YouTube algorithms serving up the next video. Our desires, values, and focus are subject to vast aggregate trends and shopping histories. We trade control for convenience, reinforcing a system that rewards passivity and reactiveness.
We all live on this raft, at least part of the time. (“Surfing” the Internet is an ironic metaphor. It implies that we're riding waves of information—active, carefree, in control—when in truth they're crashing down on us.) And that can be okay. Amazon, for instance, is better at picking out gifts than my own family. Who knew I couldn't live without a loopy iPhone case? Amazon did.
Floating on a raft at work is far less benign.
Our friend Harry is digging into an important presentation. A colleague pops in with a question that takes 10 minutes. Then he takes a bathroom break—there goes that inhibitory spillover. Kidding, kind of. Just as Harry starts to refocus, an urgent e-mail arrives. Another 10 minutes gone.
He exhales, then loses himself in Facebook for 15 minutes. The first slide is almost done (yes!) when a meeting reminder pops up. Harry will have to finish his presentation at home after everyone's in bed.
He is busy, to be sure. But reactive will never be productive.
Harry is stuck on a raft.
The Sailboat
Jack contends with the same ocean but navigates quite differently. Jack is on a sailboat.
Instead of helplessly succumbing to the wind, he harnesses its power with focus sails. Jack acts instead of reacting. He is focus-wise.
Before starting his own presentation, Jack puts a sign outside his office asking others to e-mail him with any needs, then closes the door. Next, he turns off the notifications on his smartphone and sets an autoreply telling colleagues to call with anything urgent. (He knows the world is less likely to call him than e-mail or text.)
Jack's cruising on his presentation when the meeting reminder pops up. He needs to go, but it's okay; he has arranged with his manager to stay for only the first 15 minutes. Besides, it'll give him a chance to catch a colleague with information vital to Jack's presentation—which he later finishes before 5.
Jack limits distraction in some areas and uses it to his advantage in others. He affects his environment in a way that inspires others to emulate him. Instead of drifting on a raft, he captains a sailboat.
Other, less productive employees look at Jack and think, “I wonder if he is using the same wind we are using.” He is, but he is more focus-wise than those around him, so he can get to where he is going (a completed presentation) faster.
Drop That Marshmallow
It would be impossible to overstate the importance of cultivating a sail mindset.
You've probably heard of the marshmallow test, a series of studies on delayed gratification in the late 1960s and early 1970s by psychologist Walter Mischel at Stanford University.1 Children were offered one marshmallow now or two later if they could wait about 15 minutes.
Some kids ate the marshmallow as soon as the researchers left the room. Others resisted at first, smelling and touching the treat, but ultimately gave in. Still others managed to wait for the greater reward.
The test results proved more accurate than IQ in predicting SAT scores, drug and alcohol resistance, body mass index, and other life measures. The children who waited did better in all these areas.
What separated those who could resist from those who indulged? The winners kicked the table, pulled their hair, and even covered their eyes to neutralize the object of their desire. At first glance, this might seem like an example of kids simply distracting themselves, but the implications run far deeper. The differentiator between the successful and unsuccessful was not their willpower but rather their ability to take control of their attention. The marshmallow served as the tempting distraction keeping them from their goal. They put their attention in a more productive place as they shifted it away from the marshmallow. A child's version of the power of the sail mindset in action, something that proved to be of incalculable worth for the rest of their lives.
Jack, by the way, wanted to check his Facebook feed as much as Harry did. But he exercised the cognitive self-control to redirect his attention, ignoring the metaphorical marshmallow in the process. By resisting all the marshmallows around him, Jack claimed a greater reward: finishing his presentation at work so he could enjoy his evening.
Are you equipping your people to manage the endless supply of marshmallows in front of them? Or are they shoving as many as they possibly can in their mouths and playing Chubby Bunny all day?
Allocating the Right Focus at the Right Time
To be focus-wise, we need to recognize that focus isn't one-size-fits-all. Some roles and venues require more of it, others less. Some tasks can even be done with the TV on (the murmur of golf is rather soothing).
Focus-wise workers know what, when, where, and how much it's appropriate to focus. The constantly connected workplace contains many layers. Let's look at a few of them.
Where and When
Different situations require different levels of focused effort. We need full focus for things like hard mental work, deep thinking, prioritizing, and engaged conversation because our brains aren't wired to think about two things at once. (Effective tools, including a focus vault where you can work undisturbed, will be discussed in later chapters.) During a deep conversation with your spouse, you would never turn on the basketball game and claim to be multitasking (unless you plan on that spouse becoming an ex-spouse).
Other moments require less focus, such as replying to routine e-mails or copying-pasting data into spreadsheets. Some of your employees can do these tasks with light distractions in the background (the same way you—and by you, I mean me—might listen to a favorite high fantasy novel possibly called The Wheel of Time while washing dishes).
As we learned in Chapter 4, pairing certain light tasks can actually boost retention (through inhibitory spillover). A handout I provide during speeches says that doodling can improve focus and memory by 30 percent. Try it sometime.
There are times when little to no focus is required (such as during happy hour). At other moments, speed and availability matter more. For instance, if you handle flight bookings, being available during bad weather and responding quickly are more important than deep thinking.
Roles
Focus also differs depending on the role. I once audited an all-team quarterly meeting on a consulting project. Everyone was asked to “find a place of inefficiency that is costing you time and mental energy unnecessarily.” An admin said he could save two hours a week if his boss would just take 20 minutes to format data differently.
Easy solution, right? Wrong.
His boss was a global thought leader who earned $50,000 per speech. The admin made $15 an hour—his job was to do everything, including inefficient tasks, to preserve the boss's attention resources.
Part of being focus-wise is understanding that not all roles are created equal. Often, the most focus-wise action you can take is to divide roles in such a way that some individuals are assigned to handle the interruptions. For instance, a recent client reorganized their tech department. Applying lean methodology, they divided the teams between application development and maintenance. The maintenance team's sole responsibility is to handle the unexpected emergencies that previously wreaked havoc across the entire department. Product developers now work without interruption. The overall attention resources of the organization are far more efficiently allocated when those who most need focused work are given it.
Scale
Sometimes I start a presentation by showing a close-up section of the Mona Lisa that looks like globs of paint. “Who would hang this on their wall?” I ask. I then zoom out to the proper perspective and a masterpiece emerges from the chaos.
Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull will at times remind his artists that they're putting their own Mona Lisa under a blanket when they spend days on a background setting for a three-second segment. No one will notice their masterpiece.
Knowing what level of focus is required for a given situation is another aspect of being focus-wise.
Choices and Consequences
Despite the advice of many self-help gurus, it is, in fact, impossible to work a full-time job, work out 10 hours a week, coach the kids' soccer team, serve on the church committee, and get a full night's sleep. We have to make choices on what we're going to spend our time and energy on.
One of my clients, JR Rosania, is a sponsored athlete, an 18-time Ironman triathlete, and one of the world's leading fitness trainers. To become elite, he used to train 6 hours a day—on top of his day job.
But JR's single-minded devotion had damaged a more important part of his life. His wife put it plainly: “JR, I need a husband, and our kids need their daddy.”
The ensuing conversation between them changed his life. JR needed to understand the difference between being physically fit and having real health. He learned a hard but important lesson—hyperfocus in one area often means abject failure in others. Like an invasive plant in a fragile ecosystem, hyperfocus sucks up all available resources. Now he speaks to others about how to achieve true health.
Many of my other athlete clients are so hyperfocused that they struggle to manage even basic responsibilities. They oversleep, missing appointments. Bills go unpaid. They don't know how to prioritize because life has been reduced to one priority: professional success.
They could use a little of JR's hard-earned insight.
You can help your people achieve effective balance in the way they allocate their focus. To simplify without being simple. To focus while allowing for diversion. To be digitally connected without being addicted.