FOCUS

TIME
WORKBOOK
 Why is Focus Time Important?

You’ve probably heard of Focus Time several times, or you might already be practicing it. But why do
we need to do Focus Time? Let’s use the essay of Paul Graham as an example.

In “Maker’s schedule and Manager’s schedule” Paul Graham talks about two different modes of work:
1. Maker’s Schedule
Makers need large chunks of time to focus on their creative work. However, they have a lot
of interruptions or meetings and they never get to do meaningful work or move forward with
their goals.
2. Manager’s Schedule
For this schedule, 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 interruption
or a meeting. You just roll on to the next thing.

Most of us have both modes of work during our workday. We have meetings to attend and reports to
create. We also have creative work to do that needs focused attention. This means that we need to
have both modes of work booked into the optimal times of our day. The ‘when’ part in doing work is
as important as the ‘what’ to work on. In the book “When” by Daniel Pink, he mentions that we usu-
ally feel good in the morning and can focus well. And then in the afternoon, focus is hard and we’re
less productive. Generally, we can again be more focused late in the afternoon and into the evening.
This is regardless if you are a morning person or a night owl. Morning people start this early in the
day and night owls start later in the day--it’s still the same pattern.

Knowing this, we need to make sure that we plan our focused-work first thing in our day. For exam-
ple, if you are a morning person and depending on how early you wake up, you can block the first 3
to 5 hours of your day for just focused-work. After you’re done with your focus-time, don’t forget to
take a break and perhaps later in the afternoon, you can do your manager tasks.

Focus-time means no distractions. If you work from home then it’s important to set expectations
with those you live with. If you are in an office environment, mark your calendar as busy, close your
door, or let your team know about your focus-time.

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In Cal Newport’s “Deep Work”, he deals with the increasing distractions. Most companies expect you
to be on Slack or some other internal chat where you can be reached at a moment’s notice. These
tools don’t take into account what our mode of work is and most employers never count the cost of
the “always available mindset” that they push on their employees.

In “Paid to Think”, David Goldsmith addresses this in the workplace when he says, “Too many proj-
ects overload people with too many thoughts, details, 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 establishes what he calls the rule of two
that means you can have one priority project and then a backup. Once you go over two projects,
you’re going to be less and less productive with your time because of the context switching. The
creativity cost of being always available is a lot.

Think about a programmer adding more and more to his head as he dives into a problem. Then some-
one walks up to his desk to ask about email! With that simple distraction, it’s now 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.

A study from Basex research that says, “the cost of interruptions to the U.S. economy is $588 bil-
lion dollars in lost productivity per year”. In Scrum by Jeff Sutherland, they talk about this cost in
the context of solving problems later or right now as you find them in software development. He
said, “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 something is being done. You’re holding a pretty complicated
construct in your head. Re-creating that construct 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 that we need to avoid all interruptions to make it happen. The cost of not having
that time is huge and but unfortunately, we usually don’t notice them.

If you think that working alone or at home automatically gets you focus time, you’re not entirely
right. It’s possible to spend an entire morning or afternoon alone and not get any focused time. You
might find yourself just going over Twitter, email, news, or some Wikipedia page. If this is you, it’s
possible that the distractions are not the real issue and it might just be a symptom of the problem.
That problem may be that you hate the work you’re doing. It may also be that you’re stressed about
money and simply can’t focus.

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In the Dojo course Thinking Time, there’s a set of questions to ask yourself to help you identify if
you’re dealing with the real problems or the symptoms. 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?

Once you address the problems, it would be easier to focus and get you nearer to where you want to
be.

Action Steps

What would be your ideal day be with focus time? Create a sample schedule below.

Interruptions are detrimental to focus time and it’s important to know what those interruptions are.
Make a list of your top three interruptions and also your plan on how to cut those interruptions out.

Are there any interruptions that you listed above that are just a symptom 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

One of the first things you need to address 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 anything meaningful, then it’s going
to be a daily uphill battle to have any type of focus. This is about your purpose and your why. When
we can connect our work to our purpose then it’s much easier to find and stick to focused work.

Don’t get discouraged if you don’t think that your job is lined up with a purpose. Almost every job
can be in alignment 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 care. Being a doctor takes more
education and gets more recognition as being a job that has a purpose built-in. A hospital room that’s
not clean will mean that the patient doesn’t have a great stay and they are more likely to get sick
and then complain about the hospital. With that example, we see that they both serve a purpose.

Finding focus time starts with connecting your purpose to your job. If you’ve already got your pur-
pose down, it’s time to start being intentional with what you spend your time on during the week.
You can check out the Time Blocking Dojo course to use as a refresher.

Here are some simple steps to get focus time:

1. Block out all the things you can’t move (meetings, family responsibilities, doctor’s appointment,
soccer practice, etc)
2. Look for larger blocks of time in your calendar that you can add your focus time (you can start
with an hour and gradually increase once you get used to it)
3. Inside your biggest focus time block, aim for the maximum number of Pomodoro cycles
4. At the end of every day, plan out your next day

Nothing is set in stone. If a change needs to be made, then make the change. Do you need to make
any changes in your day based on what happened today? Do you need to shuffle any tasks around lat-
er in the week because the more important things didn’t get done today? As you do this, it’s import-
ant to consider when is your best time to work. Regardless 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.

Now that you have your schedule set, it’s important to make sure that your tools are set up to facili-
tate focused work. You need to decide what your tools are for. Do you need your phone during your

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Focus Time? Do you need access to social media via your phone? Do you need to be notified every
time an email comes in? Look at each of your devices and decide what the job of a particular device
is. Then only allow applications to be installed on it that make this task easier.

Once you have a set of tools that are built on our focus, it’s time to take a look around your environ-
ment. A work environment that isn’t set up for focused work will mean that you’re going to be less
productive. For example, a messy desk is not the best setup for focused work. Tidy up your work-
space that everything has a place and it’s easy to reach but it’s out of your way. You can use com-
fortable over the ear headphones. It cancels out noise and you can use it as a sign for everyone else
(and yourself) that it’s time for work.

One of the final hurdles to jump with getting focused time is the expectations of others. Whether
you’re working from home or in an office, some would assume that since you’re there, you are al-
ways available. It could be for a short chitchat or a meeting that you don’t have to attend. These
types of interruptions can kill the momentum you have with your work.

Action Steps

Your purpose plays a vital role when you do focused work. If you haven’t started on your purpose
journey, here are some good questions to ask yourself:

• 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?

Using your calendar, create time blocks for your focus time. Make sure that you have already blocked
out events that can’t be moved (meetings, appointments, etc). Review the Dojo course on Time
Blocking if you need some help creating these time blocks. Looking at your updated calendar, how
many hours of focused work will you be doing tomorrow?

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What apps do you need for your focus time? List them down. Whatever is not on your list, remove
those from your devices and only add them back when you need them.

What devices do you need during your focus time? List them down and remove anything you don’t
need.

Picture out your ideal working space. What do you need to do so that you can get this space? How
can this help with your focused work?

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 Getting Focus Time at a Job

Working in an office environment means different expectations at all levels. There’s your team, your
boss, your co-workers, or anyone else in the office building.

We’re going to go over some strategies that you can use with your boss and your co-workers so you
can all get focused time and start cranking out high-quality work. It is possible for anyone to have
focus time in your organization--you don’t have to do it alone.

1. Get buy-in from the person you report directly to. Ask 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 also think about it.
2. 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 spend on your high-value activities.

Your manager might be surprised that you’re spending so little time with core value activities. You
can then work together to maximize the time you spend on your core value, which almost always
results in more focus time.

One favorite is company-wide focus hours. With this idea, you’d say that 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 follow it up by finishing the day out with more focus time. 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 a 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.

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”. If you are a manager, stop
doing the easy way out. Start looking at methods like Scrum to evaluate the difficulty and value of
the tasks that are around for your team. The goal of Scrum is to maximize the value derived from

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each story point that is accomplished. 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.

Action Steps

What are the top three things of value that you do at work? List them down and then speak with your
boss if you’re on the right track.

Track how much time you spend on these value activities. Write them below.

Go back to your boss and discuss the time you have tracked. What did your boss say? Based on your
conversation with your boss, how much time should you be spending on these activities? Write them
down.

Update your calendar with your focus time and schedule in your high-value activities. What will be
your schedule for the next few days?

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 When is Focus Time Bad?
Although important, focus time is not always ideal.

If you’re a leader in your field, domain-specific experience and collaboration likely won’t benefit you
much. Morten Hansen, in his book Great at Work, found that if you have extensive experience in the
field anything more than a short gut check was negatively correlated with good outcome. Look for
focused time with a couple of check-ins to make sure you’re not way off base. Brainstorming sessions
are also a great time to collaborate.

If you’re brainstorming make sure you have prepped your team with the questions that will be
addressed before the meeting and 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 works. Will video be the best? Or should you be writing for trade
publication? 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. If you set your
phone to do not disturb mode during focus time, make sure you inform your partner about it. 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 relationships around you. If you’re going to focus,
you also need to schedule a check-in time 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. You also need to
schedule a time to interact with other areas of your life.

According to the Happiness Advantage, one of the strongest predictors of coming through hard times
at work is the level of connection you have with your co-workers.

Too much focus can also harm you. There are seasons in life that require focused time and
commitment and you should never discourage working hard on things that matter. Unfortunately,
most of us have become busy with 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 turns into a lifestyle of work
without anything else, that’s just not good for your health.

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A recent study in The Guardian brought us research showing that working more than thirty-nine hours
a week is bad for us. Focus time is 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 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 so that you can all be on the same
page about your focus time.

Action Steps

Identify the areas you don’t have enough domain-specific knowledge and you should be defaulting to
some collaboration. What areas are these?

Who are those three to five people that you can help and will help you by collaborating on do-
main-specific areas?

Identify the people that you need to work on resetting expectations with so that you can all be on
the same page about your focus time. Who are they and what are the expectations that you will set?

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