“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
(Herbert Simon)
In this class, we will review the following points:
- The context and need for learning how to focus in a world always more dynamic, connected and fed with tons of information.
- The most common misconception about focusing.
- A suggested definition of what is focusing in a startup context.
Let’s start with some background.
1. Context
The abundance of Information = Distraction
Today startup founders and their team struggle with too many emails, too much social media, too many competing and changing priorities, and too many interruptions.If you want to stay focused, many things around you will distract you.
If you want to stay focused, be aware that many things around you will distract you.
The research shows we get interrupted or distracted every three minutes on average. According to statistics, the total time lost per day for office workers being unproductive is three hours or more ( Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less, Michael Hyatt, 2019).
Non Stop Connectivity = Pace Disfunction
The world is always connected, and you can assess the information almost everywhere at any time. The Internet and smartphones combined made this reliable. The continuous access to information - a special thanks to the smartphone for this - makes it hard for people to pace their work. For example, studies say that in the worry to save time at work and deliver faster:
- 80% check their email before going into the office.
- 30% do it before they even get out of bed in the morning.
The endless connectivity provokes for most of us a pace of dysfunction. It is a bit like when you travel from Europe to Brazil and change the time zone. You woke up at 3 am instead of 7 am and would like to go to bed at 6 pm but then are not able to fall asleep at 11 p.m. Here it is related to your working pace. Being always connected could, in theory, allow anyone to work 24h/7, but this is not a suitable place. You would literally die! Yes, like video gaming addicts that can not pace themselves, forgot to eat, drink, sleep, and die.
Too many of us, when joining a startup, get stuck in this connectivity machine—waking up checking our emails, going to bed checking our emails, and even pretending to go to the baths\room when in a restaurant with friends to be able to catch up with work. The problem is not the connectivity or your smartphone; the problem is self-discipline and the ability to pace yourself. Like when you have to run a marathon, you can’t start at 17km/h, at least most runners can’t.
As a result, we are increasingly scattered and stressed.
The number of people feeling stressed in the workplace is increasing. Again, the fault is not on the abundance of the information nor the connectivity. This is the responsibility of you, founder, to ensure a culture of work where people focus and can move the needle - in the right way. This is the responsibility of you, startup team player, to promote and embrace a culture and way to work that is efficient and healthy for you.
In fact, in a world where information is freely available, the focus becomes one of the most valuable commodities in the workplace.
So what is the focus and getting things done about the 2020 Startup Industry and what it is not about?
2. Misconceptions about focus
The productivity of the Manufacturing era
In economic sciences, productivity is the ratio of the production of goods and services by the factors of productivity, which to keep it simple are mainly human work and capital.
Therefore, the way human capital productivity is calculated is the ratio between the output produced and the labor input used (usual numbers of hours or headcount)
The concept of productivity started to be widely used in the time of manufacturing when blue collar workers were accomplishing repetitive tasks. Therefore being able to speed up its production process would allow the organization to get a marginal gain. For manual work, we only need efficiency; that is, the ability to do things right rather than the ability to get the right things done. Until recently, “Knowledge or Creative” workers were not predominant at work (Drucker, The Effective Executive, The Definitive Guide to Get The Right Things Done, 2006 )
The arrival of information technology and computing transformed our manufacturing economy. Productivity in the digital economy is disrupted by different factors and virtual technology, which has allowed exponential growth through automatization and higher reach. Therefore it has drastically reduced the price of goods and services. But productivity in the digital era can’t rely only on technology progress. In a startup, labor productivity can’t be optimized by task repetition (it can help, but it has a limit) or amount of hours worked (it can help as well, but it has a limit). Labor productivity in the startup of 2020 is about technical skills and growth mindset, which will allow us to find loopholes to hack the system and do things faster, better, and cheaper. It’s also about endurance and resilience to grow a business in highly dynamic conditions and turbulences in the long run. Also, startups are not made of “manual workers” but gather “knowledge workers,” which require another type of management. The economist Peter Drucker explained in his book The Effective Executive, The Definitive Guide to Get The Right Things Done:
“The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself toward performance and contribution, that is, toward effectiveness.
...
The greatest wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data. The knowledge
worker, therefore, must do something which a manual worker need not do. He must provide effectiveness. He cannot depend on the utility his output carries with it as does a well-made pair of shoes.”
Getting your Daily to Do all Checked
As founders and especially startup team players, we tend to build TO DO LIST with things we have to get done during the day. This makes us feel safe, especially if we were able to cross the whole checklist by the end of the day. It has a taste of “Get Shit Done”.
It is NOT the sense we should give it, in any case! Daily To-Do list is a type of manufacturing production channel. You take the one on top of the list, you execute, you check, and start again with the second one. The difference is that those tasks will usually differ from one to another (especially in a startup team where we need to touch a bit of everything).
The main problem of the To-Do List is that we tend to go in order from top to bottom with no real priority and thought.
That said a To-Do List is a GREAT tool to help you keep on top of tasks, deadlines and especially to not forget any details (for example, if you organise an event with your company - To-Do List is a MUST!)
Answering all your Emails within 24h
You have probably heard it: “Emails should all be answered within less than 24h”.
This is indeed a good habit to try to keep BUT this should not be a Golden Rule. Eventually, this could be a Key Result to maintain for the team involved in customer service and attendance.
It is not something I recommend to encourage within the company.
The typical Slack message of the colleague sending a screenshot of his/her mailbox and texting “Mailbox clean. All emails answered. 0 inbox” should not be celebrated. This will promote the wrong culture of efficiency. Most likely, it will also stress your other colleagues to do the same, which might imply the team put aside some more urgent deliverables.
Answering email is the new Tetris of workers. You answer one and it allows you to class it in your email labels, reducing “your wall” of unanswered/unread emails. Like Tetris, it can be stressful. Above all, like Tetris, it's addictive.
At one point, we get tired by the day and in the last hour we decide to clean the mailbox again and we answer in aggressive tones to a client or with a typo. This could have a pretty bad impact on your retention.
Founders should educate their team and make it clear that playing the Tetris Email Game is - usually - not the path to get the right things done for the company.
Working Late or 15h a day
Working Late is probably one of the worst diseases in the startup industry. We are very good at making it viral within our team.
Examples:
- Founders on slack of #General channel: “Huge thanks to the Product team that has been working all night long to get the new version of our app released on time!”.
- Team members talking together: “I have so much work, I work every day till 23:00 pm”.
- Founder starting his zoom call: “Sorry almost did not sleep, I was preparing the pitch deck till 3:00 am”.
- Team players sitting next to each other at the office...8:00pm...9:00pm...10:00pm...11.00pm...midnight...Obviously no one wants to go first!
Let’s be honest. In a startup, as a founder and also as a startup team player - you will have to work more than the common workers and sometimes you will also have to work late. The reason for this is simple- startups have less human resources to get a similar amount of work done than any company and faster.
THAT SAID - this is not something you should celebrate! RATHER you should see it as one of your key problems to solve. You can put it as an objective - Keeping daily working hours by an average 10h while ensuring monthly growth 20%. Your objective is to find how to optimize working time, growing at the same pace but spending less time at work. In the long run, this will help you with talent retention and to not burn the team.
3. How to define Focus?
Focus:
In the startup world focus does not mean doing one thing at a time. This is a dream world definition; the truth is in a startup team, you will need to do multiple things at the same time. Being focused is about intensity.
A good example of focus is the focus of an outstanding Salesperson - which is often presented as the ABC Rule- Always Be Closing. This means that the SalesPerson has the only goal to sell and will find a way to close no matter what. It starts at the beginning of the sales funnel by having the ability to generate opportunity at scale, sourcing potential prospects and screening fast to define with whom you should focus. It continues in the proposal phase where the salesperson has to build in a shorter amount of time a proposal adapted to the need of the prospects respecting the rule of profit for the company. It ends with the negotiations where the Salesperson needs to follow up, sometimes more than 10 times. The Salesperson should know what he/she is ready to give up to close. Sales is an intense process and this is why it requests focus.
Proactivity:
Being proactive is about taking responsibility for what you can have control of. There are different forces around us on which you can’t have control (climat, economics, politics) and there are others that are in your circle of influence, meaning that you can control them (attitude, what you want to learn, habits you have, etc). Proactive people will focus only on the forces they can influence. They know they can not do anything about the other forces but complaining. They understand complaining will not lead them anywhere new.
Proactive People don’t complain about what they can’t control, instead they take action about things they can impact.
Priority :
According to Oussama Amar, Partner at The Family , as an entrepreneur you should separate your task in two categories: Growth or Not Growth. The founders should focus (be intense and put the highest level of energy) in things that help them grow. The priority for startup is the growth (or eventually at early beginning reaching Product/Market fit). In next class, we will get more into some tactics to prioritize.
Making Decisions:
Making decisions requires focus. The flow of information, data, opinion from your team, advice from your mentors will help you make decisions but at the same time add complexity to the decision process, considering you will have to consider and analyze different information and perspective. Keep in mind: it is ultimately up to the entrepreneur to make the decision and move on! It is your responsibility.
Great entrepreneurs know how to synthesize data/information, make a decision fast about the path to follow, and execute. They have the respect and trust from their team and therefore the authority to enhance their decision. Also, Authority gain is important for top leaders and leaders down to the CEOs, if team leaders have the decision power but no authority toward their team, Then it will not bring efficiency.
Honesty:
You will have to make many decisions and fast, therefore you will make many mistakes. It is extremely important to be able to say and accept that sometimes “I was wrong”. It Is critical that you scale this mindset of honesty and integrity toward failures within your team. Being wrong is perfectly fine! You will learn out of it. The important step is to admit it fast, to iterate fast.
Stress Management
You are leading an organization in a chaotic environment. Dynamic markets, reduced team, limited capital, no brand recognition, different ideas of product improvement in your heads, stakeholders expectation - are examples of the complexity gravitating around your startup. Your role is to find the right balance in the chaos and move fast. The goal is to do things faster, in less time at less cost, so you can survive. As we said Focus is a question of intensity. Therefore, you will have to have a “solid” mentally to lead in this context.
The first step to manage stress and pressure is to know yourself and be honest with yourself. Ask yourself these questions:
- What is your type of personality: extrovert or introvert?
- Do you take decisions based on facts or emotions?
- What do you fear from external forces?
- What do you fear from yourself?
- When do you tend to get stress and how does your stress go out (aggressivity, over sensibility, lost of confidence leading to the difficulty to make decisions, etc.).
- What are your soft skills strengths and weaknesses?
Being self-aware of your sensibility to stress and pressure and your behaviour under stress and pressure is important to better deal with it.
You will identify what you can work on. You will also be able to be more transparent with your team and let them know some pitfalls you might have when under pressure. Everyone in your team should do this introspection. This will help generate empathy and tolerance, less hard feeling, better team spirit, which leads to better focus on what matters.
KISKIL - Keep it simple, Keep it lean:
Complexity has an inverse effect on the ability to scale your business. Keep goals simple (be careful, simplicity is not the contrary of ambition), run experiments easy to implement, build lean.
Summary
Focus = Getting the right things done
Therefore, getting the right things done is all about efficiency by focusing on what matters in order to reach your final objective. It’s about achieving more faster by doing less. (Productivity was about doing more, by doing faster).
And because they can do more, faster, with less, you can learn more, which makes your efficiency curve performance grow exponentially.
In the next class, we present some techniques to prioritize and help you focus on what matters.
