Special note: Greg’s friends (and Berkeley Haas professors) Lucas Miller and Dr. Sahar Yousef are holding a lecture on The Science of Focus in the Age of Distraction for Personal Math subscribers on March 13. RSVP for free here.
I am hooked on accomplishing small tasks. And it makes me worse at my job.
I check my Slack or email every ten minutes or so when I’m working. I get an immediate dopamine hit from seeing a notification and handling it. It feels great in the moment – like I’m accomplishing something and providing value to my team (weighing in on a project, signing off on a doc, etc.).
But all those little tasks don’t add up to much. I often find I’ve gone a whole work week without doing any deep, meaningful work because I’ve spent the whole time responding to pings. And then I push the deep work to the weekend (like editing this post on Sunday at 10 a.m.).
About 10 years ago, my wife Cindy suggested I had an attention problem (“but I am just multitasking”) and that I go figure it out.
After getting tested for adult ADHD (which I don’t have) and getting a prescription for Adderall (which I didn’t need), a friend introduced me to Dr. Sahar Yousef and Lucas Miller at Berkeley Haas. They run a lab, Becoming Superhuman, coaching and training people on improving their cognitive performance. I signed up.
I am still working on it. It’s a never-ending process (Big Tech, after all, is richly incentivized to make us addicted to notifications). But here’s what I’ve learned.
- Greg
Be a worse optimizer to be a better accelerator
If you have a 1-hour block in your workday, you could do a few things with it:
Option 1: Review a proposal, attend a 15-minute standup, weigh in on a low- to medium-stakes decision, fix an error, send a status update, take care of some emails, AND prep an agenda.
Option 2: Step away from your notifications and spend an hour thinking about a major project or problem.
Option 1 is about optimizing. Your doc review, presence at a meeting, etc. will maybe make your team’s work 10% better (sometimes a bit more). And that matters, because great companies have a high bar for quality, and if you let mediocre work out the door with a “looks good” too often, you’ll be a mediocre business.
And there’s also real value to being responsive. People like working with people who respond quickly, and many small tasks are (or at least feel) time-sensitive.
Option 2 is about accelerating. The growth of your business often rests with 2-3 transformative levers, and you need time in your day to think deeply about those levers. Accelerating is about pushing past your immediate idea (“let’s just do this option”) and forcing yourself to question your plan and its assumptions.
Optimize and accelerate are both legitimate options, and every team needs a balance.
The problem is that most of us choose to “optimize” WAY more than we choose to “accelerate.” Optimizing is easier and more enjoyable – it feels more productive, and it’s fun to knock off 15 Slack responses or Asana tasks in an hour. The dopamine is hard to resist.
Accelerating is hard and sometimes unproductive (especially in the short term). You can stare at a blank document for an hour and not feel great about anything you came up with.
But if you optimize all the time, at the end of the week (or the year), you’ll find that you didn’t actually do anything to move the business forward.
To accelerate the business, you need to accept that your work won’t be perfectly optimized. You’ll greenlight lower-quality work and allow some suboptimal decisions. But the tradeoff is worth it.
How to find the time to accelerate
Two of Sahar and Lucas’ techniques have been particularly effective for me over the years. (Though I still need to re-up every year … otherwise my bad habits slip back).
The first is called Focus Sprints.
When your notifications are going off every five minutes, you’re cognitively unable to focus deeply on a task. Focus Sprints involve five steps (each one important according to how our brains works best):
Find and set aside a block of time in the calendar (e.g., an hour)
Outline what you aim to accomplish and be specific about outcomes (as opposed to just sitting down to do some work)
Cut out distractions like email / Slack and put your phone out of sight, out of mind
Use a timer to work faster
Stop and take a “brain break”
Sahar and Lucas recommend a roughly 5:1 work-to-rest ratio. So an hour-long Focus Sprint would look like working very intensely for 50 minutes straight (it’s a sprint, after all) and then taking a 10 minute brain break before going back to your regular work. What is a proper “brain break”? It means no active processing of information. No reading, no writing, no arithmetic. An actual break to let your brain recover from the sprint.
I do 2-3 focus sprints per week, usually focused on writing, researching, or thinking through growth or profitability levers for the business. And I try to schedule my focus sprints for my most productive time of day (early morning) based on my biological chronotype. This involves sacrifice, because that’s usually when team members want to meet, but it’s totally worth the non-linear ROI I get in that one hour.
The second technique is called daily MITs (or Most Important Tasks).
This means starting each day by asking yourself “what will my future self thank me for?” and then writing down the 1-3 most important things that will define success for that day. These don’t always have to be huge projects…but you should start to notice if they’re always small things like “review blog post.”
“But I can’t find an extra hour in the day”
You might be thinking, “I know I need to accelerate more – but I’m literally dragged into meetings, Teams messages, and random issues all day, every day.”
We get it – being in high demand is part of being a rising leader. But here’s the truth:
1. You don’t need to be involved in everything. Every single decision, document, roadmap, etc. does not need your sign off to be good enough. You can permanently decline a few of those meetings and they won’t notice you’re gone.
2. You need to let go of the desire to “check things off.” Some of your inability to step away isn’t actually about providing value. It’s about feeling productive, and having tasks to move to the “done” column of your to-do list. You need to break that habit.
3. You actually do have an hour in the day. We’re talking about 50 minutes, not 3 hours. Decline a useless meeting, delegate some tasks, and reduce your “looking at the internet” time, and we promise you can find it.
My advice
If it still feels impossible to prioritize deep work, my advice is to try focus sprints and MITs for 4-6 weeks and see how you feel.
When I do this, I like the change in myself. I notice I’m doing more interesting work that matters, and spending less time checking email or Slacks (sometimes just for the sake of checking it).
I also notice that I’m delivering more value – in the form of better ideas and smarter strategies – to my executive team and the board. Checking off small tasks is the bare minimum of what people expect of high performers, and particularly executives, and it will only keep you in your current role. To get noticed (and promoted), you need to find leverage in the business and deliver transformative value.
If you find that too much is slipping through the cracks because you’re failing to optimize, you can swing back a bit in the other direction. But don’t spend your whole year optimizing and fail to accelerate the business.
And by the way – if you block the time to accelerate, actually use it. Don’t block it off and then spend the hour checking Slack.
Have a great week,
Greg
P.S. I’ve invested real money to learn from Sahar and Lucas – and even hired them to consult with my last company. But you can learn from them for free, because they’ve agreed to lecture for Personal Math subscribers on March 13. Sign up here.
I’ve literally just booked 3 slots every week in my calendar for deep thinking + a daily 15-minute slot for MITs. I’d been meaning to do this focus sprints for a while, but reading your post gave me the nudge to actually do it. Thank you.
This is a great reminder that I need to be smarter about my Focus time. When I'm not careful, I'll block it off but continue to do miscellaneous small tasks that make me feel good.