Maintaining Focus

By Esteban Reyes, Founding Partner

Focus is a competitive advantage for entrepreneurs. However, I’ve observed sometimes founders pursue many things in parallel. I believe this is driven by a survival instinct — it’s scary to give up optionality under uncertainty.

Doing a lot of things provides relief through a false sense of progress. The biggest problem with this is that energy and time are wasted, the latter being non-renewable.

I’ve found it useful to think of maintaining focus as a habit. Habits are behaviors triggered by emotions in search for a reward. Emotions are responses to struggle. As a result, losing focus can be the defense mechanism to avoid dealing with the hard things that need to be dealt with, and that is an example of a destructive habit.

In startups habits are the routines founders and their teams are programmed to follow in response to certain situations. Constructive habits increase the likelihood your team will know how to deal with hard challenges. The best founders understand this and build their team’s culture based on a set of constructive habits, including maintaining focus.

Ask yourself every day:

1) What’s causing your team to lose focus?

2) What emotions is your team seeking or avoiding?

3) What rewards are reinforcing such behavior(s)?

Keeping a simple journal of your answers can help. After a few days of journaling you’ll identify patterns. Dissecting these patterns help you understand the routines your team carries out and what triggers them. The easiest way to convert a destructive habit into a constructive one is by changing the routines.

Example of a destructive habit:

The habit of checking email constantly is very common and can be very costly for startups. It’s incredibly hard to make asymmetrical progress relative to the competition if founders and their team cannot allocate at least a few uninterrupted hours a day to go deep into their most important work.

Example of a constructive habit:

It’s important to not confuse maintaining focus with being careless or rigid. Emails need to be answered and responsiveness matters. Startup teams need to run many experiments, and they can do that well when everyone is aligned and focused.

Lastly, maintaining focus doesn’t guarantee a successful outcome, but teams that do can pour all their energy into the few things that really matter. In my opinion this increases their ability to learn and make progress faster, which in turn increases their odds of succeeding.