Focus Beats Effort

8/28/2024

Correct focus outpaces brute efforts and long hours. The perennial problem of productivity is almost never solved with "more." It's easy but incorrect to imagine that our productivity is based solely on our ability to drive output. More correctly, it is based on our ability to develop laser focus on the right things. Thus the vast majority of my management style is not focused on driving people to "work harder" (which almost always roughly translates to "more hours"). It is instead pointed at generating the clearest possible focus. The marginal gains in productivity seen by driving more hours are almost never worth the damage done to peoples' mindset and feeling of buy-in. If your team can't be successful within normal working hours, one of a few things must be true, in order of most to least likely.

• You are not focusing on the right things
• You are not planning effectively
• You have a talent or capability issue
• You have a motivation / willingness issue

How can it be that these are in this order? Based on pure statistics and reasoning we can arrive at this conclusion.

Focusing means finding the right problems to solve; this could be a problem that goes as high as the fundamental market positioning of your company, or as low as a ticket prioritization issue.

Relevant References

This concept of focusing on the right things rather than brute effort connects to several related principles:

• prioritize-high-leverage - High leverage activities amplify the impact of focused effort
• optimize-for-the-long-term - Sustainable focus requires long-term thinking over short-term heroics
• Conservation-of-resources - Mental and physical energy are finite resources that require strategic allocation

The challenge of "focusing on the right things" relates to cognitive biases that can mislead our attention:

• selection-bias-is-everything - What we choose to focus on shapes our entire perception of problems and solutions
• Weber's Law - Our sensitivity to problems and progress depends heavily on our baseline expectations

Historical perspective on focus and productivity systems:

• 2014-08-11-the-path-to-productivity-hacks-principles-and-patterns - Earlier exploration of systematic approaches to productivity

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