So now we know that focus is a unique and precious resource—one that we can cultivate or sabotage by what tasks we do and how we choose to do them. We know that distraction can be a good thing and that there is a time for diversion, a time for deep focus, and a time for multitasking.

But our choice to focus or not doesn't happen in a vacuum. We are all subject to hidden factors that affect our ability to focus—factors that we can either harness (sailboat) or endure (raft). I call these factors the Four E's, and they will inform the strategies we discuss throughout the rest of this book.

Energy

Our energy levels affect our ability to focus. The less energy we have, the harder it is to focus. The longer we focus, the harder it is to maintain focus. This is a concept called ego depletion.¹ According to the theory, every decision you make makes the next more difficult, and every bit of energy you spend focusing intently on a task decreases the energy you'll have to focus on the next. Making yourself listen to Uncle George drone on, for instance, means you'll be too mentally exhausted to resist diving into Instagram for an hour. It gets harder to make good decisions over time.

That's why marathons, cycling competitions, and triathlons all start in the morning, even in the dead of winter. That's when endurance athletes have the most energy and, therefore, perform best.

Although not all of us are morning people, most of us tend to flag as the workday comes to an end. I've polled audiences over and over about what time of day it's toughest to stay focused:

• First two hours of work—19 percent
• Just before lunch—7 percent
• The two hours after lunch—36 percent
• Near the end of the workday—38 percent

See how many people lose focus toward the end of the day? This is ego depletion at work.

Focused attention is an energy exhaustive system. Although your brain is only about 2 percent of your body weight, it consumes 20 percent of your daily calories.² It's a hungry hungry hippo. That's why you feel ready to conquer the world after your bagel and latté but crave a nap later on. It's a glucose issue.

Our brains need energy to focus. It doesn't take much (about 25 grams of glucose in the bloodstream, a banana's worth).³ But without steady energy, work becomes sloppy.

A fascinating study revealed when parole judges were more likely to grant freedom. At the start of the day and right after lunch, prisoners had a 65 percent chance for parole. That percentage crashed to almost zero just before lunch and at the end of the day.⁴ The specific times they performed better and worse might not align with your daily energy patterns, or what we see from most workers. The nature of their work requires extended periods of intense focus without breaks to move around or grab a snack. What this tells us is how significantly our decision making and focus is enhanced or impaired based on our available energy resources. When tired or hungry, we seek shortcuts that include upholding the status quo (i.e., not granting parole).

The essential partner of glucose is sleep. Without enough of it, we struggle to focus and succumb more easily to distraction, which is also why the vast majority of those who say they can't work well in the morning probably just haven't gotten enough sleep. A lack of sleep, of course, hurts the bottom line.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared inadequate sleep, which affects more than a third of American adults, a public health issue. The resulting economic losses total $411 billion a year.⁵

So how does our awareness of the impact of our energy and glucose levels affect how we work? Rising and subsequently shining is helped by smart scheduling. Allocate precious energy to your most mentally exhausting tasks first. Do that hefty proposal now, rote e-mail responses later. (As leaders, we can help by understanding and accommodating our people's peak efficiency times—a vital but often overlooked part of managing.)

Planning starts at home. The night before, for instance, set out your clothes and prepare lunch. That way, you preserve focus and energy in the morning (more on this in Section 6).

Another way to bank energy is to limit daily decisions. Warren Buffett eats a burger every day and plays bridge every night. Barack Obama wears the same suit. The fewer decisions you have to make, the more space you have for important ones.

Environment

Want to change what you focus on? Change your sightline.

I recently started the food-reset regimen Whole30—during Girl Scout Cookie season. Eliminating processed sugar was harder with Samoas or Do-si-dos on the kitchen counter, in plain sight.

Google tackled this issue with Project M&M, an experiment in which they moved the much-consumed candy from glass jars to opaque containers. They then filled the clear jars with dried figs, pistachios, and other healthy snacks.

The results surprised even the behavioral scientists who conducted the research: Over seven weeks, employees ate 3.1 million fewer calories from M&Ms in Google's New York office alone.⁶

What's in your sightline?

Your environment shapes your focus, whether you work in a cubicle, open office, penthouse corner suite, or at home (more on workspaces in Section 3). Our eyes seize on light and movement.

In a virtual environment, this can mean an incessant parade of buttons, pop-ups, and alerts beckoning us to click. One way to regain control is to change your home screen from inbox to calendar. Copernicus famously told the world that the sun was the center of the galaxy even though everyone still believed it was the earth. In the Copernican spirit, I say you should put your calendar at the center of your computer screen even though everyone else centers their world around the inbox. Why do this? E-mail cedes control of your day to others; the calendar restores you as the master of it. Take your priorities and assign time chunks to cover each one. Set your calendar, rather than your inbox or task list, as the primary screen on your computer, and watch your productivity soar to the stars.

Emotion

Not long ago, I was asked to address the top global leaders of a Fortune 25 company—a truly amazing opportunity. Unfortunately, the conference was scheduled two days before my wife was due with our second child. Less than amazing. This left quite the quandary: risk the missed business opportunity or risk missing my son's birth day?

So I did the only reasonable thing: I made her decide.

To my surprise, she encouraged me to go. After all, I had seen my first child being born. How different could it be? When the day arrived, I kissed her goodbye and flew to New York.

I don't need to tell any parent how I was feeling as I boarded the plane. It was a huge mistake. Although the speech went well, I was a wreck. I spent the whole time berating myself for leaving my wife and possibly missing the birth of my child.

Emotion drives attention.

What does this mean for leaders? If you want your people to be focused, you have to engage the parts of them that drive their focus. And that's their emotions.

The mantra of “it's just business” fails to heed this critical truth. How many successful bands, sports teams, and business partnerships have crumbled because people ignored each other's emotions? One sarcastic comment from a colleague and all the money in the world won't overcome the emotional hijack.

The pulse of a room affects everything. When a deal is negotiated, does someone feel robbed? Does everyone on your ad hoc committee get along? During a meeting, do team members have something else on their minds?

If your people don't care about something, they'll struggle to focus on it. That makes work difficult, especially in a world where 87 percent of workers already aren't actively engaged (as we discovered in Section 1).

Cultivating focus within our employees is also about cultivating empathy within ourselves. For instance: Would a vital piece of news, good or bad, be better delivered in person than by e-mail?

Experience

Past experiences shape focus. What you have focused on is what you will focus on.

Our brains are constantly changing through something called neuroplasticity. Whenever we learn or experience something new, a neural connection is formed. The more you do a task, the more your brain remembers how to do it again. That's autopilot in a nutshell.

The first time you drove, you might have hesitated with the ignition. Then came that squeamish jolt after the engine turned over, not to mention when you put the car in gear and lurched forward.

You probably don't even remember getting in your car this morning, backing out of the driveway, then gliding into traffic. Autopilot guided your hands and feet because your brain long ago memorized all the steps (though we can feel slight vertigo after realizing we got to the market without remembering seeing an actual green light).

It's a brilliant feature. Because we can make only so many active decisions, autopilot helpfully steps in.

Our habits dictate where we focus. And as we learn new habits, our highly adaptive brains start cementing them as “normal.”

What does this mean at work? If our brains are wired to check our phones for stimuli, then we can't go long without craving a dopamine hit. In the same way, flipping back and forth between tasks makes our gray matter enjoy the novelty of it.

When we try to focus on a project, our brain shouts, “I can't pay attention anymore! Wouldn't it be cool to look at something else?”

But if we teach our brain to focus on one task for longer periods, it remembers and stops shouting. This is where focus really pays off. When we learn to focus in one sphere for a long time, expertise results.

Expertise is married to focus. And as we learned in Chapter 4, the more focused attention you give to a sphere, the more objects you can handle within that sphere. By this I don't mean the oft-quoted (and incorrect) 10,000-hour rule. Rather, expertise is achieved through intentional focus on a specific area within a sphere that then allows you to move onto other areas in that sphere once mastered. As Daniel Goleman writes regarding Anders Ericsson, the psychologist whose research spawned the 10,000-hour rule, “Hours and hours of practice are necessary for great performance, but not sufficient. How experts in any domain pay attention while practicing makes a crucial difference. For instance, in his much-cited study of violinists—the one that showed the top tier had practiced more than 10,000 hours—Ericsson found the experts did so with full concentration on improving a particular aspect of their performance that a master teacher identified.”⁷

Experience builds our ability to manage multiple inputs. We aren't born experts. But through focused training and repetition, we can learn to make our object of focus more important than anything happening on Facebook or Instagram.

We've now outlined how the Four E's—energy, environment, emotion, and experience—affect our focus. In Section 3, we'll explore the kind of space, both mental and physical, that makes the focus-wise grade.

Now That I Have Your Attention…

For Section 2 reflection questions, summary video, and next step resources, please visit focuswise.com/book