Being a founder means having to move between different types of work, because the nature of the job requires you to constantly be wearing multiple hats. While this can be a fantastic training ground for developing new skills, it makes learning how to focus effectively much harder. Traditional productivity advice does not account for the fact that many apparent distractions for founders can be legitimate responsibilities they must pay attention to.
A common misconception I’ve seen among fellow founders is the tendency to confuse focus with being busy. When we can tick several tasks off our to-do lists, we feel good because completing something gives us a sense of reward and motivates us to keep going. The risk is that this motivation is usually fueled by the easiest tasks, and we lack the discipline to decide whether each task actually deserves our focus.
To understand why, we need to be clear about what focus means. We often use the term focus to describe the willpower to sit at a desk for a long period of time and complete the work in front of us. I would call this concentration, which is an important skill, but is not the same as focus. Concentration can be applied to any task, whereas focus is attention placed where it has consequences.
In practice, maintaining focus has required me to reduce the number of times I reconsider what deserves my time during the day. I begin each working day by writing down the decisions I need to make and reserving time to think about them before my calendar fills with other people’s priorities. I make these calendar blocks visible to the team because, when they can see which decisions are in progress, they are more likely to bring forward useful information without turning every question into an unnecessary meeting.
The five habits below are the ones I find most effective in protecting my focus.
1. Track the decisions instead of areas of work
Most of us have been conditioned to write very general goals that we want to accomplish, such as “work on onboarding.” But because these types of goals are indefinite, anything connected to the vague overarching idea—in this case anything about onboarding—can count as “progress.”
You should instead try to write much more specific targets. With the onboarding example, you might instead write something like, “By Friday, I need to understand why people leave before completing onboarding.”
2. Decide what could change your mind before you begin
Founders inevitably make decisions before they have complete information. It’s important to have a certain level of belief in one’s own ideas, but interpreting new information only through the lens of your own convictions can lead to exceptionally rigid thinking.
To avoid this happening, before investigating a new problem I try to identify what I could learn that would make me revise my current point of view.
3. Schedule in your deep thinking
Many founders do not spend enough time in deep thought because they never reserve time for it and try to squeeze it in around their meetings and other commitments. Time to sit and think should never be an afterthought because this is where the most meaningful decisions can be made. I schedule focus time on my calendar first and then arrange my meetings around it.
4. Keep small decisions close to the work
There are many decisions where several options are reasonable and the person closest to the work has enough context to determine the right choice. Let them choose. If every small ambiguity has to travel upward, the company learns that the founder makes all the decisions rather than the people doing the work. As a founder, you may feel useful in the moment when resolving every decision, but you are actually making the organization less capable of acting without you.
5. End the week with review
You will only become better at focusing if you spend time examining how your previous attempts to focus have worked. At the end of the week consider the way you worked, paying attention to whether the time you protected allowed you to think properly and when your concentration began to wander. If you felt particularly locked in at certain points, consider what made that possible. If you struggled, identify where your plan failed and make a concrete adjustment for the following week. Without this reflection, the next week is likely to reproduce the same conditions without a better understanding of how your attention works.
Focus does not come naturally to everyone and is more challenging to maintain in a stressful job, such as being a founder. Establishing a good practice from the start is instrumental to staying on track and not getting easily overwhelmed.