FOCUS TIME

Transcripts
 Why is Focus Time Important?
Video 1

Welcome to the Asian Efficiency video course on creating time to focus. At the end of this course,
we’ll cover four things. First, why focus time is so important. Second, how to get more focused time
in your work. Third, how to talk with your boss and team about creating more focus time even if you
work in a corporate environment where that can be really difficult. And fourth, understanding when
focus time is actually a bad thing.

This first video is all about why focus time is so important. There are few resources that I always go
back to as I think about focus time. The first is Paul Graham’s excellent essay called “Maker’s sched-
ule and manager’s schedule”. In this essay, Graham talks about two different modes of work. Makers
need large chunks of time to focus on their creative work. They have a bunch of interruptions or
meetings they never get to dig in deep to their work. They were always trying to get that flywheel
spinning instead of getting to ride the wave of momentum. The second method of working is the
manager’s schedule. For managers, an hour is an hour. You can do a meeting in an hour or answer an
email or talk with your team randomly throughout the office. There is really no penalty for interrup-
tion or a meeting. You just roll on to the next thing.

Now the truth is that most of us have tasks on both types in our workday. We have meetings to at-
tend and expense reports to file. We have creative work to do that takes the long focused attention.
That means we need to be sure that we have both modes of work booked into the optimal times
of our day. In his recently published book, “When”, Daniel Pink teaches us about positive aspects.
The summary is that we usually feel good in the morning and can focus. We have a lonely afternoon
where focus is hard and we’re less productive. We can generally be more focused again late in the
afternoon and into the evening. Now this is regardless of if you are a morning person or a night owl.
Morning people start this pattern early and night owls started later in the day. It’s still the same
pattern. Recognizing this, we need to make sure that we plan our focused work first thing in our day.
I’m a morning person so this works perfectly for me. I start my focus between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. I
work till sometime between 8 and 10 and then I take a break for a couple hours then get back at it
in the afternoon for a few hours when I’m starting to ride my way back up. During these afternoon
hours, I allow myself more distractions. That’s when I do my manager tasks. The morning is entirely
devoted to writing and creative focused work with no distractions at all. My wife can’t even send
me a text message because my phone will not alert me to it. The only way that she can interrupt my
focus times is with a phone call and she’s the only one that can interrupt. To set up for this on my
iPhone is fairly straightforward. I turned on “Do Not Disturb” and then only added my wife’s phone
number on a call as a VIP. I left the iMessage, portion of her contact information off of the VIP list.

The second resource I often gravitate towards is Cal Newport’s, “Deep Work”. In this book, Newport
deals with ever increasing distractions that are expected of most people. Most jobs expect you to be
on Slack or in some other internal chat where you can be reached at a moment’s notice. These tools

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don’t take into account what our mode of work is and most employers never count the cost of this
always available mindset that they push on people. In “Paid to Think”, David Goldsmith addresses
this in the workplace when he says, “Too many projects overload people with too many thoughts, de-
tails, and activities, which ultimately leads to decreased performance levels, like an instance where
an individual is working on a spreadsheet, becomes interrupted, loses his or her train of thought, and
makes a small error in calculation that could snowball into disastrous results later.” Goldsmith actu-
ally establishes what he calls the rule of two. That means you can have one priority project and then
a backup. That’s it. Once you get over two items, you’re getting less and less productive with your
time because of the context switching. The cost of being always available is so much loss creativity.
It’s a fairly well known programmers cartoon strip where the programmer keeps adding more and
more to his head as he dives into a problem. Then someone walked up to his desk to ask about email
and pop! It’s all gone from his head. This is all of us. The price of interruptions is that we don’t get
to think holistically about a problem.

There is a study out there from Basex research that says, “the cost of interruptions to the U.S. econ-
omy is five hundred and eighty-eight billion dollars in lost productivity. Yeah, that was billion dollars.
It’s all from getting your head back into the headspace of the problem. In Scrum by Jeff Sutherland,
they talk about this cost again in the context of solving problems later or right now as you find them
in software development. Here’s a quote from Sutherland, “When you’re working on a project,
there’s a whole mind space that you create around it. You know all the different reasons why some-
thing is being done. You’re holding a pretty complicated construct in your head. Re-creating that
consctruct a week later is hard. You have to remember all the factors that you were considering
when you made the choice. You have to re-create the thought process that led you to the decision.
You have to become your past self again, put yourself back inside a mind that no longer exists. Doing
that takes time. A long time. Twenty-four times as long as it would have taken if you had fixed the
problem when you first discovered it.” The bottom line is that we’re all creative. We all have some
part of our job that requires long focus and that means need to avoid all interruptions to make it
happen. Cost to not having that time are huge and we mostly don’t notice them. Now you may just
work by yourself. That may mean like me, no one compels you to be on Slack. Like you have no one
is going to stop by your office to see what’s up or to talk with a sports team that seems to go around
the office.

Just because you’re alone it doesn’t mean that you automatically get focused time. I know I spent
the entire afternoon at home alone when I could have focused and I mostly just filter on Twitter and
e-mail. I did nothing that I was focused at all. If you’re finding that this is you and it’s quite possible
that the distractions are not the real issue, it’s possible that they’re simply symptoms of the prob-
lem. That problem may be that you hate the work you’re doing. It may be that you’re stressed about
money and simply can’t focus. In the Dojo video course on thinking time, Penn has a great set of
questions to ask yourself to help you identify if you’re dealing with the real problems or the symp-
toms. A few examples of his questions are: What is the gap between where you are and where you
want to be? If you can’t tell me then you’re probably not specific enough. What is the single obstacle
in the way of getting to your goal? Why am I not where I want to be? Why is this a problem to begin
with? If I could only _____ really well I’d already have it figured out. What can I do today to improve
this situation? While I already said, Deep Work by Cal Newport, this course is not a substitute for the
Dojo course we already have on Deep Work. We already assume that you’re familiar with the anti-

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benefit mindset and that you work hard to not think that just because something has some benefit it
must be good for you. The deeper course is also a great addition to this one on focus time if you’re
looking to do more work that matters.

As we leave this video, I want to leave you with two action. First make a list of the top three inter-
ruptions and make a plan to cut them out. Second. Are there any interruptions that are just a symp-
tom of a bigger problem? If so, what is that bigger problem? What steps are you going to take to fix
them.

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 How to Get Focus Time
Video 2

Welcome to the Asian Efficiency video course on getting focused time with your work. We spent the
last video talking about the stress and overload that your brain has to deal with if you’re not spend-
ing time focused. In this video, we’re going to talk about how to get yourself focused time. If you
don’t have control over some of these things because of your work environment, don’t get discour-
aged.

In the next video, we’re going to talk about strategies to get focused time at your job. One of the
first things you need to address if you’re finding it hard to get focused time is what type of work are
you doing. Are you doing the work that you feel is valuable? If your work is not connected to any
meaning for you, then it’s going to be an uphill battle everyday to have any type of focus. I’m not
just talking passion here, I’m talking about your purpose and your why. When we can connect our
work to our purpose then it’s much easier to find and stick with focused work. Don’t get discouraged
here if you don’t think that your job is lined up with a purpose. Almost every job can be in align-
ment with a purpose. Here’s an example. Both a doctor and a cleaning person can have the purpose
of ensuring that someone gets the best medical state they can. Sure, one job takes more education
and probably gets more recognition as being a job that has a purpose built in. But they both have
purpose. A hospital room that’s not well clean will mean that the patient doesn’t have a great stay.
They are more likely to get sick and then complain about the hospital.

My purpose is to help people not only do great work but to build a job or business that lets them
hang out with their family while earning what they need to live the life they want. I currently do
that through things like this video course but I could do it as a barista at Starbucks. Through my in-
teractions with customers, I could be talking about the books I’ve read and asking about their work. I
could be sharing my thoughts and helping to make the environment suited to the work they’re play-
ing to do in the coffee shop. Yes, one job maybe much more visibly purpose driven but neither would
be a true departure for purpose. Finding focus time starts with connecting your purpose to your
job. Here’s some good questions to ask yourself if you haven’t got started on this journey. Do I love
what I do? Am I just showing up to earn a paycheck? If I had to quit my current big project right now,
would I be disappointed or relieved? What would my ideal life look like in five years? What would it
look like to be the parent, spouse, or partner I want to be? What would it look like to have the job
that I dream of? There are certainly many more questions you can ask yourself. If you’ve already got
your purpose down, it’s time to start being intentional with what you spend your time on during the
week. I’ve already done a whole Dojo course on time blockings, so I’m not going to cover that all
again.

In short, on Friday take a look at what you want to accomplish in the week. Block out all the things
you can’t move like meetings and family responsibilities. Now, you have your workweek defined, put
your tasks in your calendar. Aim for larger blocks of focus times that you can really get into the flow
of the work at hand. I like 3 hour blocks but it was a hard start. Start with an hour. If that even feels

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hard, check with the Pomodoro Technique and use 25 minutes as your first starting block. Inside of
your biggest focused block of time, aim for the maximum number of pomodoro cycles available. Now
with your week planned, make sure you sit down at the end of every day for 50 minutes and plan out
your day ahead. Do you need to make any changes in your day based on what happened today? Do
you need to shuffle any tasks around later in the week because the more important things didn’t get
done today? As you do this, it’s important to consider when is your best time to work. Regardless of
if you’re a morning person or a night owl, we’re usually able to do better focused work shortly after
we wake up. It’s harder to focus after around 4 to 5 hours of being awake. That means you should
plan your time of being strict about no distraction in deep focused work shortly after you get up. You
should be planning any e-mail time or time or distraction can creep in in your later blocks of work
when it’s harder to focus anything. Going a much deeper dive into when you should be doing differ-
ent work and you should read, “When” by Daniel Pink.

Now assuming that you have a good time blocked out for folks to work. It’s important to make sure
that your tools are set up to facilitate that focused work. I’ve recently made a switch to a mostly
iOS workflow. I really only opened my computer when I’m doing audio recording. I continue to find
that even with a bunch of other things, I’m going to recommend in a minute, the different windows
overlapping that a desktop environment allow us meant that I was easily distracted by switching to
iOS for almost everything I do. I no longer have the option of quickly switching between applications.
It allowed me to focus even better than I was already able to. The first step in getting your tool set
up or focus is deciding what your tools are for. Is your phone for social media or only for emergency
calls? If it’s for calls and text messages, why do you have any social media apps on it? Before I moved
most of my work over to my iPad, it was only a writing tool. I had Ulysses and Scrivener installed and
a few sketching applications for off work hours and drawing. But that’s it. No social media, no noti-
fications allowed. No email, no calendar. It was a tool designed specifically for the task of writing.
Now with most of my work happening in iOS, there are a few more things installed like a good e-mail
client but still no social media and there are still no notifications on it. Imessages are even turned
off. Look at each of your devices and decide what its job is. Then only allow applications to be in-
stalled on it that make this task easier. Once you’ve got a set of tools that are built on our focus, it’s
time to take a look around you at your environment. Even if your tools are the best in the business
for exactly what you’re doing. A work environment that isn’t set up to be the best it can be for your
work will mean that you’re going to be less productive.

In episode 5 of Hurry Slowly, Austin Kleon talks about having two different desks. One is for his
computer work and one is for his analog artwork. He physically separates different modes of work
so that distractions can’t invade them. Similarly in episode 36 of Cortex, CPG Grey talks about the
same idea. He has different offices around town and in his house for different modes of work. He
has two desks in his remote office for different modes of working. He’s gone as far as having differ-
ent computers for different types of work. The goal is to get to a new workspace and easily drop
into the mode of creative work that needs to be done because his brain connects the work with the
space he’s in. Building this type of office starts by recognizing what help you work well. One thing
that always helps me is to set up comfortable over the ear headphones. Even when I’m sitting at
home alone with no outside noise, they’ll find me wearing a set of headphones. Over the years they
become a strong cue for me that it’s just time to work. Take it a step further and tidy up your work-
space that everything has a place and it’s easy to reach but it’s out of your way. Also think about how

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you enter your workspace. Do you need a routine of coffee in your hand? Whatever your cues are.
Identify them and use them to work. My headphone queue is strong enough that I take over the ear
headphones everywhere and easily drop into work no matter where I am once the headphones are
on. I don’t even need music.

One of the final hurdles to jump with getting focused time is the expectations of others. As soon as
I started working for myself, my mother would call or send me messages in whatever chat software
we used at the time. Her expectation was that I would be around because I was working at home.
These types of interruptions can kill the momentum you have with your work. My wife was even like
this when we had our first child. She came into the office so much in that first day as she waited
to have her oldest child, I took money off my desk and sent her away to get coffee with anyone. It
didn’t matter. She just had to stop interrupting my workflow. Since then my wife and I have come to
a way better understanding with how we work. In fact, like I said in the first video, she can’t even
text me when I’m working because I run my phone on do not disturb mode. The text comes in, I just
don’t see any notifications of it. The only thing she can do is call me and then my phone will ring.
The only person that can disturb me while I’m working is my wife. There are no other VIPs on my
phone. So turn off distractions and use “do not disturb” mode on your devices when you want to get
work done.

I’ve taken it as far as turning Imessage off on my iPad and my Mac, so I don’t see them. I have no
notifications on either device as well. When you have others that want to get in touch with you reg-
ularly, evaluate the importance of the notification to you. It doesn’t matter for your work. Are you
better off because you were interrupted or you either flow? Don’t worry so much about others’ think
is important for you. Figure out your most important tasks for the day. Then sequester yourself so
that you can focus on them until they’re done. To finish this off, we have four actions for you. First
is create time blocks for doing focused work. Review the Dojo course on time blocking if you need
some help creating these time blocks. Second, remove all the apps from your devices and only add
them back when you need them. Third, decide what your devices are for and remove anything you
don’t need. Fourth, look at different spaces you can work in. Which ones are best for different types
of work?

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 Getting Focus Time at a Job
Video 3

Welcome to the third video in the Asian Efficiency Dojo course on Focus Time. So far we’ve talked
about getting focused mostly with the assumption that you don’t have to get much buy-in from those
around you. At least you’re not trying to convince your boss who would decide your expectations for
you. In this video we’re going to look at strategies to use with your boss and your co-workers so you
can all get focused time and start cranking out high quality work. By way of starting, it is totally pos-
sible for anyone to hit focused time in your organization. In my first web development job, I regular-
ly had no distractions for hours a day in the midst of an office that was continually interrupting many
of my colleague. I did this in part by using some of the tools I’ve already talked about. I bought a
really cheap set of huge headphones that there was no way anyone missed I was wearing them, they
were even bright pink. I slyly convinced the team that moving our collaboration table to the middle
of the room was a great idea, and it did free up more space and put under the skylight. But really it
blocked the main path to the work area with a table that was 6 feet away. Had to walk around this
table to come talk to anyone. This table act is the spot where most people would stop and lean to
try talk the design develop a team. That meant I would regularly ignore someone that came to talk
to me and sit at the table. They’d see my big pink headphones and almost every time they’d walk
away when I didn’t move.

The kicker is that I was a only listening to something maybe 50 percent of the time. The rest of the
time I just raised the bar for interrupting me and people decided that it wasn’t worth the distrac-
tion. I’m not sure I cut distraction in the same manner within the 10 years under my belt. It was a
pretty blunt instrument, but it worked. Here’s how I’d tackle the problem of getting everyone in the
office more focused time now. The starting point is getting buy-in from the person you report di-
rectly to. Start by asking for a meeting to discuss the three things that you do which bring the most
value to your organization. Let them know the purpose up front so they can be thinking about it. Sit
down together and decide what the three most important things are in your job, and then leave with
the homework of tracking your time so that you can tell your boss how much real time you spent on
your highest value activities. Most of the time when you report back your manager will be surprised,
and not in a good way. They’ll be surprised you’re spending so little time with those core value ac-
tivities. Then you get to work together to maximize the time that you do get to spend on your core
value, which almost always results in more focus time. You’ve been working and focused time for
your team and there are few ways to tackle the problem of getting that. My favorite one is company
wide focus hours. With this idea you’d say that say from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. is focused time, no
meetings, no phone calls, no slack, no messaging services, no visiting the offices, everyone heads
down working.

Then from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m is meetings, regular office hours, regular office chat, and you fol-
low it up by finishing the day out with more focus time. In Rework, episode 13, the chief data wran-
gler talks about getting interrupted in work and feeling like he was always putting out fires instead
of getting good focused work done. To combat this, he introduced regular office hours. For an entire
day in a week, he’ll be available on a call so that someone on the team can ask him any question,

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he’ll dig into the data with them until he’s done. This stopped the random questions and interrup-
tions and funneled many requests to their base camp, to their project manager system where they
could get done as he prioritized them. The other requests that took more data wrangling had natural
time and everyone was aware of it. If you can’t set hours then aim for a single recognizable sym-
bol that says it’s time to focus. My big pink headphones were this. No one could mistake that I was
trying to focus on some work when they tried to talk to me. In Deep Work, Cal Newport talks with
two scientists that shared a desk. When one had a question for the other they placed a pencil on the
middle. Then at natural stopping point questions would get answered. There are many variations of
this maybe your Slack’s status works, or a sign on your chair that has two different colors. Red could
mean stop because you’re working. Just find something to agree on and let everyone know what it
is. Much of this comes down to having a better way to value what you bring to the job.

So many times we default to hours which is terrible. In a great book called “Rest”, Alex Pang says,
“Measuring time is literally the easiest way to assess someone’s dedication and productivity, but it’s
also very unreliable”. Now, if you are a manager commit to stop going with the easy way out. Start
looking at methods like scrum to evaluate the difficulty in value of the tasks that are around for your
team. The goal of a scrum is to maximize the value derived from each story point that is accom-
plished. This also helps enforce that if you want to add a new task to the list either the deadlines
must change or something has to come off the list. Once you move from button seat time to value
produced it’s so much easier to get everyone focused on good solid uninterrupted work time. When
everyone is focused on hour is only than value is put by the wayside. To end this we have four actions
for you. First, right down the top three things of value at work. Talk about this with your boss to
make sure that you’re on the right track. Second, start tracking how much time you spend at these
value activities. Third, get together with your boss to evaluate how much time you are spending, and
how much time you should be spending on these activities. Fourth, look at either developing core
focus hours or a single indicator you can use to show that it’s focus time.

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 When is Focus Time Bad?
Video 4

Welcome to the final video in the Asian Efficiency Dojo video course on Focus Time. So far we’ve only
talked about the benefits of focus time but focus time is not always the ideal. In this video we’re go-
ing to examine when focus time might not be what you want to do and how to make sure you’re not
going overboard. We can fall into any benefit thinking on either side of the focus time equation. You
can say that if some focus time is good, then more is always better. You could also say that if some
collaboration is good, more is better. In “Great at Work” by Morten Hansen they researched this very
idea and came up with a few guidelines for when we should be looking to collaborate and when it’s
better to just focus.

If you’re a leader in your field with lots of domain specific experience and collaboration likely won’t
benefit you much. But Hansen found that if you have extensive experience in the field, anything
more than a short gut check was negatively correlated with good outcome. If you’re a leader in a
field, look for focus time with a couple check-ins to make sure you’re not way off base.

Brainstorming is also a great time to collaborate. The whole goal of brainstorming is let ideas fly.
So out of the huge vault of them you’d come up with something that is going to push your company
or your idea forward. If you’re brainstorming make sure that you have prepped your team with the
questions that will be addressed before the meeting. Expect them to show up for the meeting with
ideas in hand. Use the meeting time to address the ideas and come up with any new ones within the
team.

The next good time to knuckle on focus is when you just don’t know the answer. Maybe you’re trying
to market a new product that work. Will video be the best or should you be writing for trade publi-
cation? Don’t go all-in focused on one method until you have some inkling about which one will be
converting the best.

Finally make sure that you have the expectations of those around you set properly. I didn’t start
running my phone in do not disturb mode without talking to my wife. She knew that if she sent me a
message to get milk I may not see it until I was about to leave wherever I was working. The random
text messages about the silly things our kids, did that just needed some venting and her part, could
also wait. She just needed that vent. Before you dive deep into focus make sure that those who’ll be
affected have at least some knowledge of how things will change so you don’t harm those relation-
ships around you.

A few years ago when my in-laws were visiting I saw a strong expectation mismatch between my
father-in-law and myself. He did regularly bring one of our kids up to say hi to dad and then I started
getting annoyed. He didn’t take it well. The thing is he’s never worked from home. He didn’t under-
stand that I focus during work hours so I don’t have to think about work when it’s time to hang out
with the kids. Once we had a good talk with that I only ever got called for true firsts. Like first words
and first steps. Our expectations were now the same during work hours.

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If you’re going to focus you also need to schedule a check-in times for other things in your work. If
you have a Slack team, but no notifications, then you’re going to need to make sure you check-in
fairly regularly. I do this by having my morning work block from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. be full focus
mode. The afternoon block from twelve to three is when I have Slack open on a second screen and I
will participate in some of the different discussions that are going on. On days I’m working from my
iPad only, I’ll use that afternoon block and check-in two or three times to Slack to see what’s going
on. You also need to schedule time to interact with other areas of your life. According to the Happi-
ness Advantage one of the strongest predictors of coming through hard times at work is the level of
connection you have with your co-workers. So make sure you build some connection.

Now too much focus can also harm you and the more of less they say. Certainly there are seasons
in life that require focused time and commitment and you should never discourage working hard on
things that matter. Unfortunately, however, most of us have become busy over all the wrong things
and we have a lot of false assumptions to drive our schedules.

The final problem with focus is that instead of just a season of intense work or routine of a few hours
a day with no interruptions or two days a week, turned into a lifestyle of work without anything else.
That’s just not good for your health.

A recent study in The Guardian brought us research showing that working more than thirty nine hours
a week is bad for us. It’s important to remember that focus time it’s not a contest. You don’t win
points by getting more hours in than someone else. You should be counting your time as only good
if you’re shipping more quality work and making sure that you are balancing your work hours with
hours that are good for the rest of your life.

To end this course we have three more actions for you. First, identify the areas where you don’t
have enough domain specific knowledge and you should be defaulting to some collaboration. Second,
who are those three to five people that you can help and will help you by collaborating? And third,
identify the people that you need to work on resetting expectations with, that you can all be on the
same page about your focus time.

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