The Power of Focus

What focus is, why it matters and how to become more focused

Focus is an important concept. This essay explains:

• what focus is in an intuitive way
• the benefits of focus
• when focus is useful and when it’s harmful

Focus and Success

“Ninety percent of everything is crap.” — Sturgeon’s Law

The Pareto Principle says that 80% of results come from 20% of action. Both Sturgeon’s Law and the Pareto Principle emphasize focusing on what is important and valuable over everything else.

Most highly successful people in history have been focused specialists. For example, Einstein was focused on physics, Elon Musk is focused on technology and Shakespeare focused on writing.

Warren Buffett, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and John D. Rockefeller on focus:

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say *no* to almost everything.” — Warren Buffett

“Concentrate all your thoughts on the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.” — Alexander Graham Bell

“The only trouble is that they do it about a great many things and I do it about one. If they took the time in question and applied it in one direction, to one object, they would succeed.” — Thomas Edison

“Do not many of us who fail to achieve big things fail because we lack concentration, the art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else?” — John D Rockefeller

There are some exceptions to the rule like Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin but most highly talented people have been focused specialists.

Time vs Focused Time

In the short term, your level of concentration or focus has a large impact on your productivity. Here’s why:

progress = time x speed

There’s more to getting stuff done than just spending time on a task. You need to work fast enough too. Many factors affect how fast you work. The most significant factor affecting work speed is probably concentration or attention.

Imagine asking two people to write this essay and giving each person an hour. One person works with total concentration and the other spends much of that hour daydreaming and looking out the window. How much work would each person get done? The first person, who spent all their time concentrating, might finish the essay or at least make a lot of progress. The other person, might make no progress.

Even with the same amount of time, the first person accomplished more because they worked faster. And they worked faster, because they had more concentration. Thus given constant time, more concentration = faster working speed = more productivity.

Time management is a common topic but what really matters is focused time management. As the example above shows, time is worthless for getting stuff done without concentration.

The resource you need to get stuff done is focused time, not time.

Focused time = time x concentration

Working 40 hours per week provides you with 40 hours of time per week for work. But not all of that time is productive. Even if you took no breaks and spent all 40 hours on work, it would be very difficult, almost impossible, to work for 40 hours per week with complete attention on cognitively demanding tasks (eg. writing) because of directed attention fatigue.

In reality, only about half that time will be spent in a focused state so you have about 20 hours of focused time per week for work.

Focused time = time x concentration = 40 x 0.5 = 20 hours

So, although you have 40 hours of time for work, you only have about 20 hours of focused time.

The purpose of this essay is to explain how to divide up your limited weekly quantity of focused time so that you can work as effectively as possible.

What Does it Mean to Be Focused?

Focused time is a useful resource but what does it mean to be focused or unfocused?

How focused someone is is inversely proportional to how many activities they do. A person who is highly focused does few activities and consequently has a lot of focused time for each activity as the following pie chart shows:

An unfocused person is the opposite. While they have the same amount of time as a focused person, they will divide it among more activities as the following pie chart shows. Notice how little focused time there is for each activity:

The two pie charts above are a bit simplistic and are only there to explain the difference between being focused or unfocused. The following pie charts are more realistic. The next pie chart is of a focused person spends most of their day at work and then divides the remaining time between only two activities:

The next chart represents how a less focused person would spend their day. They go to work and then splits up the remainder of their time among five activities instead of two:

Again, notice how slim each slice has gotten. The less focused person has much less time per activity than the focused person.

The Benefits of Focus

Focus is Essential

First of all, why do we need to focus in the first place? Why not just do everything? The reason why focus is essential is because there is simply not enough time to do everything. For example, there are about 130 million books in the world. If you read one book per week, then it would take you about two million years to read all of them. Since time is limited, you need to be selective and filter out only the best.

Doing everything is rarely practical. Therefore, you need to focus by making choices and eliminating unnecessary time sinks.

Focus Accelerates Progress

In physics, a sharper knife is sharper and more effective than a blunt knife because it applies more pressure. Pressure is defined as force divided by area. Sharper knives apply more pressure without any additional force by decreasing the area they act on.

Similarly, by focusing and decreasing the number of activities you spend time on, you’ll make progress faster.

Achieving excellence requires a large time investment. According to psychologist Anders Ericsson, it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve world class performance in a skill. If you were developing five skills and you spent one hour per day on each skill, then it would take you about 10,000 days to become world class in all five skills. That’s about 27 years!

Instead, you could accelerate your progress by focusing on the one skill you care about most and putting all five hours into that one skill. Doing this would cut the total time needed to master that one skill to just 5 years which is a lot more convenient.

A person reading 100 books and 100 pages per day, would read only one page per day for each book. But if you read only one book and read 100 pages per day, then you would make 100 pages of progress per book per day.

If you want to make progress as fast as possible on a goal, focus on it by eliminating other less important goals.

Focus on Activities With Exponential Returns

Many activities have exponential returns where doubling the input effort results in more than double the returns.

These kinds of activities are the best to focus on. For example, the average Championship professional soccer player earns roughly half a million dollars per year whereas Cristiano Ronaldo earns about thirty-five million dollars per year.

Does he work 70 times harder than the other Premier League players? No. The top players probably work about twice as hard as average players. The reason why they can earn so much more is because of exponential returns on the effort invested.

Examples of activities which have exponential returns:

• investing money (eg. compound interest)
• developing skills: the best athletes, lawyers, doctors, programmers, writers, actors and singers are often much (5X — 1000X+) more rich and famous than even if they only work two or three times as hard.

If an activity you care about has exponential returns, then becoming twice as focused and investing twice as much effort could result in, not twice the results, but 5X, 10X or 100X the results or more.

The following diagram shows why focusing makes sense when there are exponential returns. There are two possible choices, the horizontal rectangle which represents investing a small amount of effort into many activities and the vertical rectangle which corresponds to choosing one activity and investing all your time into it:

If you choose the horizontal option, you only get a total of three coins. But if you choose the vertical rectangle, you get 1 + 10 + 100 = 111 coins which is far more. This diagram shows that if an activity has exponential returns, focusing on it can yield much more results than dividing your time between multiple activities.

A doctor choosing whether to become a leading expert in a certain field or average at many fields is another real-life example of this.

How to Become More Focused: Eliminate

You can become more focused by reducing the number of commitments you have so that more time and effort can be applied to each commitment. As Warren Buffett said in the quote above, you need to start saying no to more activities.

To do this, sort your current commitments by importance and then eliminate the ones at the bottom, the least important ones.

Here’s a simple example of this method in action: you have several dollar bills and you are asked to eliminate two of them.

1. $100
2. $50
3. $20
4. $10

Which ones do you eliminate? Obviously it makes sense to get rid of the $10 and $20 because they are less valuable than the $50 and $100 bills. Likewise, if you have too many commitments, it makes sense to eliminate the less important ones so that you have more time for the more important ones.

This is easy to do with money but how do you rate and rank how valuable your commitments are? A question that is helpful is to ask yourself, “If I had to spend my whole day on one thing, what would it be?”. In other words, what is your top priority in life at the moment? That should go at the top of the list.

According to the Eisenhower Matrix, the goals with the highest priority are urgent and important. Therefore, the goals that are urgent and important should go at the top of the list. As mentioned above, focus helps accelerate progress on your goals which is particularly useful when they are urgent.

Another trick is to take two commitments on the list and compare them to each other. Then ask yourself which of the two is more important and valuable. Then swap their rank on the list so that the more valuable task is swapped up and the less important one is swapped down. Repeat this process until the list has the right order (1).

Now that you have your ranked list of priorities, you need to decide whether any of your tasks should be eliminated. In the example above, although the $10 bill is the least valuable bill in the list, it is still worth keeping.

If you feel that you have enough time for all the activities on your list and you think they are all worth doing, then you may not need to eliminate any activities from the list.

However, if you feel overwhelmed with work, are making progress too slowly on some goal or just feel generally unfocused, then you might want to eliminate or at least reduce the amount of time you spend on activities near the bottom of the list.

How to Become More Focused: Concentrate

Reducing the number of activities you are working on gives your more time for each activity. But since progress = time x speed, you need speed in addition to time and you need to concentrate to work fast.

So how do you improve your ability to concentrate? Two effective methods are to be working on a clear goal and to use the pomodoro method. The first method involves writing down exactly what you want to do and then writing down subgoals (if necessary). A system that can help with this is the Kanban system where you can drag and drop tasks from a to do list to a doing list and then a done list (Trello is a popular Kanban web app).

The pomodoro method involves working for 25 minutes on a task with total concentration and then taking a 5 minute break. The 5 minute break might seem like a waste of time but it actually makes a lot of sense. For example, if you encounter a distraction during the 25 minute work period, you can say to yourself that you will deal with it when the pomodoro ends. The 5 minute break also gives you time to rest, and reflect on what you’ve achieved in the past 25 minutes. You can always shorten the 5 minute break if necessary.

Another benefit of using the pomodoro method is that it helps you to quantify your time. If you have eight hours to work on something, it’s not clear how much you could get done in that eight hour window. With the pomodoro method, you know how many pomodoros you have and you know roughly how much you can accomplish in each pomodoro from experience.

I personally use Kanbanflow because it includes the Kanban system and pomodoros in one app.

Having more time for an activity can also make you vulnerable to Parkinson’s Law:

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

To counteract Parkinson’s Law, set deadlines so that your rate of progress does not slow down. The end of each pomodoro is a sort of natural deadline which helps to counteract Parkinson’s Law.

More Focus is Not Always Better

We’ve covered what focus is, the many benefits of focus and how to become more focused. However, there are situations where more focus either makes no difference or is worse than being less focused.

Diversify to Reduce Risk

There are many benefits to being focused but focus comes with risks too. Focus makes you more effective at what you are focusing on but it also reduces redundancy and increases the risk posed by failure. Why do airplanes typically have two engines? One of the reasons is redundancy — if one of the engines fails, the other one allows the plane to continue to fly.

Yes, failure may be less likely if you are more focused on an activity. However, random risk is always present and doesn’t decrease with focus. For example, a business owner who spent more time managing their business would have more time to solve problems. But this extra focus has no effect on external factors like changes in the the economy or consumer tastes.

In investing, the solution to this kind of unpredictability is diversification. Investors generally avoid investing all their money in one company because if it fails, they could suffer a catastrophic loss. Instead, investors diversify by investing in many companies. If there are a hundred investments, and one investment fails, then the investors still have ninety-nine other investments.

A similar idea to diversification is a back up plan or plan B. For example, many entrepreneurs have savings or continue to work a day job in case their business fails.

Diversify When There Are Diminishing Returns

Many activities have diminishing returns. It’s often best to minimize the amount of time you spend on these activities.

For example, brushing your teeth for one minute might clean your teeth 90%. Spending ten minutes brushing your teeth won’t increase the cleanliness of your teeth by a factor of ten. Instead it will be more like a factor of 1.2. Therefore, there are diminishing returns and it’s often a waste of time to spend too much time on these kinds of activities.

Examples of activities with diminishing returns:

• Work: working 120 hours per week instead of 40 won’t make you three times more productive. You might even be less productive.
• Relationships: having 1000 friends is usually not much more valuable than having 10 friends.
• Exercise: exercising 10 hours per day is not 10 times healthier than one hour per day. There are diminishing returns.
• Making money: a wealthy person might have a standard of living that is much better than a poor person but beyond that point, there are diminishing returns. Living in a house is much better than being homeless but living in a mansion is not that much better than living in a house.
• Learning: sometimes there are diminishing returns beyond learning the basics in subjects such as math — most people will use basic math more often than advanced math. In languages, the most common 10% of words are used about 90% of the time.

This diagram illustrates a situation where there are diminishing returns for each activity:

As you can see, in this example, dividing your time among several activities (the horizontal rectangle) is better than putting all your time into one activity (the vertical rectangle).

Choosing the horizontal rectangle results in 300 coins whereas choosing the vertical one results in a total of just 111 coins. Shopping is a great example of a scenario like this. Most people would agree that it’s better to buy one or two of everything than one hundred loaves of just bread.

Summary

• Many great people were highly focused. Doing one thing is the most extreme level of focus.
• Progress = time x speed and you can only work fast if you are concentrating. Increase your concentration to work faster.
• Focus accelerates progress. Cutting the number of projects you are working on will roughly double your rate of progress in the remaining projects.
• Focus on activities with exponential returns (eg. some skills or careers, investing).
• To become more focused, do less my eliminating unnecessary activities and commitments so that you have more time for the important ones.
• How to concentrate better: have a clear goal when working, set deadlines, use a pomodoro timer. Try to achieve a flow state.
• diversify or have backup plans to reduce risk because there is always a risk of failure.
• diversify when there are diminishing returns as focusing on activities with diminishing returns is often a waste of time (eg. spending an hour brushing your teeth is a waste of time).

Notes

(1) this method is inspired by the bubble sort algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_sort