Focus: the Beauty of Theory
Why the topic of Focus?
This story begins almost two years ago.
At the time, I had been newly appointed Product Manager at BlaBlaCar, and was experiencing a steep learning curve, both on the topics I managed, and on the job itself.
During my end-of-year appraisal interview, the #1 feedback I received from my manager was “narrow-down your focus”.
Indeed, as a Product Manager, you are constantly flooded with:
- issues your users face
- ideas from users, coworkers, friends
- requests from the sales team, managers
In hindsight, it made perfect sense to bring this point to my attention, as I was clearly struggling with prioritizing. The first quarterly roadmap I drafted as a Product manager included 14 projects, 12 of which were “Priority 1” and 2 of which were “Priority 2”! And this was for a team of only 4 developers, 1 designer and 2 data scientists.
I’ve worked hard on improving this skill of focus the past two years, which I feel much more confident about today. Here are the key lessons I have learned on this so far.
Why is focus so important?
In a nutshell:
- It will have a tremendous positive impact on your work: better compound effects, faster delivery, fewer mistakes
- It will have actual spill-over effects on your personal well-being
Let’s break this down.
1. A tremendous positive impact on your work
Compound impact. Focusing on very few topics allows for earlier impact by concentrating on resources and decreasing time-to-delivery. Delivering 3 product features 1 by 1 with a high degree of focus will have a much bigger compounded impact than working on all 3 in parallel and releasing them at the same time.
For instance, at BlaBlaCar, I recently used to work on 2 features at the same time: one to allow drivers to indicate the route they take when publishing a carpool trip on the app, and one to allow them to seamlessly put this route in their favorite GPS. We have good reasons to want to release them both simultaneously, but that requires postponing the launch by a few months. In the midst of the current COVID-19 context, which makes our drivers reluctant to share their empty seats, a delightful feature such as easy GPS navigation for your carpool could reactivate drivers to come back on BlaBlaCar much earlier. This would hence increase the cumulated effect of them coming back over the long run.
Manage your time. Chances are high that working on 3 features at the same time will actually take more time to deliver. Indeed, constantly switching topics bears time and mental charge.
From a neurological standpoint, multiple tasks are never parallel-processed. Your brain just rapidly switches from one task to another. It’s just biologically impossible for the brain to multitask.
In other words, our brain is hard-wired to focus on one thing at a time. Multiple researchers have proven the adverse effects of treating multiple subjects simultaneously. Increased propensity to make errors, impeded ability to both memorize and retrieve information from memory, ADHD, addictions… Managing too many topics in parallel is biologically unnatural and counterproductive.
It can even be dangerous! When flying a plane, for instance, task saturation is one of the top 10 safety concerns of the National Business Aviation Association. Pilots rely on a framework “Aviate, Navigate, Communicate” to focus back on the most essential matters when overloaded with information.
Avoid errors. Finally, doing multiple things at the same time actually compounds errors. Why? Because focusing on 1 project will allow you to draw lessons from it and apply it to the next one, instead of committing the same mistakes on several projects in parallel.
2. Spill-over effects on your personal well-being
Focusing will also have a great actual impact on your personal well-being.
By making you more efficient at getting things done, focusing on very few topics will actually enhance your confidence because you’ll have concrete evidence of your progress much more frequently. And guess what? Provided that you work on meaningful projects, making progress is the #1 lever that boosts inner work life.
I’m sure you have already felt this satisfaction of getting closer to a key objective at the end of the day, because of your progress.
Even though it seems like our brain is made to focus, why is it so hard ? and how can we get better at it?
I’ll tackle those questions in part 2 of this series: The Beast of Practicing focus.
