How to focus and stay efficient as a founder
Priorities are constantly in flux and competing for your attention. This is especially true for founders, and effective strategies for being decisive become even more important.
👋🏽 Welcome to A Founder’s Life for Me! I’m Alek, and I’ll share my experiences building tech companies to provide practical recommendations on building your own thing.
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Why am I writing this now?
I told a story in my last post about how I taught myself how to build a MacOS application over the course of a couple of weeks. For me, high-importance and high-uncertainty tasks can cause a lot of stress. The stressful part is managing my focus. Do I focus 100% on building the Mac app, do I reply to messages, start new sales conversations, or handle client-facing tasks?
You’ll leave this article with an understanding of how cognitive dissonance impedes your efficiency and advice on how to make quick decisions to increase your efficiency.
Cognitive dissonance distracts you and lowers your overall efficiency.
A lot of what I talk about in this post and others boils down to dealing with cognitive dissonance early and often. Cognitive dissonance happens when you carry inconsistent thoughts or beliefs. Effectively, cognitive dissonance is a form of indecision. This indecision can be something you’re unaware of. As a founder, carrying cognitive dissonance leads to stress and lower efficiency.
My favorite example of cognitive dissonance is my daily phone reminder to exercise:
Bad behavior: Some days, I carry the burden of cognitive dissonance by holding on to the belief that “I will exercise today” with the inconsistent belief that “I don’t have time to exercise because I have too much work .” I leave the reminder unchecked, and whenever I look at my phone, I feel guilty because I haven’t made time to exercise yet. I carry this guilt all day until, after dinner, I look at my phone and decide, “I’m not going to exercise today,” and snooze the reminder until tomorrow.
Good behavior: Other days, when I receive the daily reminder I mark it as “done” immediately. I either schedule a workout block or immediately decide that I won’t be able to make time for the workout. I avoid feeling guilty because I put the upfront thought into what was more important. Without that burden of guilt, I can spend more focused time on whatever I’m doing, whether it’s relaxing and watching a show with my wife, or getting more work done.
This is a small example of what I mean by cognitive dissonance in your daily decision-making. On its own, the impact is small but there are hundreds of pressures competing for your attention every day.
Hundreds of pressures compete for your attention; Their impact stacks up.
In daily life, there are hundreds of priorities competing for your attention. If you don’t make decisions about when/if you’ll tackle the priority, you end up distracted and inefficient. Here are two of the most common examples you’ll experience every day.
(EXAMPLE 1) You receive an email:
Common approach: You read the email and think, “I’ll get to this later.” A few hours pass. You look at the email every time you open your inbox, and you think about your response. Toward the end of the day, you finally muster up the energy to respond. You re-read the email and finally write and send your reply.
Decisive approach: You see the email in your inbox for the first time during an intentional block of time to manage your emails. You reply immediately or add “respond to email” to your to-do list and remove it from your inbox. You don’t get distracted or think about the email again until your next email block.
(EXAMPLE 2) You receive a notification on your computer or phone:
Common approach: You read the notification, click through to see what it’s about, and then mark the message as unread thinking “I’ll get to this later.” You return to whatever you were working on. You have to re-trace your steps from where you left off and you’ve fallen out of your flow for working on the task.
Decisive approach: You turn off notifications. You plan breaks from your focused work to check your inbox or messages.
In both examples, by following the common approach, you end up continuously distracted. You have less time to work because of the constant distraction. The time you do spend working is less efficient because you’re less focused. By following the decisive approach, you get to spend longer intervals focused on whatever you need. Ultimately, you get more done in less time.
One of the greatest ways to improve your focus and efficiency is to turn off notifications for anything that’s not extremely time sensitive. Personally, I have notifications on all of my devices turned off for everything except for anything that is truly time-sensitive: phone calls and calendar events. It might result in slightly slower response times, but I remain in complete control of my focus at all times.
Daily planning sessions pull forward decision making and increase efficiency
There are days where I leave my daily to-do list with way too many things on it. I end up distracted by all of the things on my plate and constantly wondering if I’m focusing on the right things. On these days, I get less done and I consistently feel guilty about whatever I’m spending time on.
Most days I invest five minutes at the beginning of the day to get organized and set goals. I decide “here are the achievable outcomes I’m going to complete today, and here’s what it will take to get them done. The rest can wait until tomorrow, next week, etc.” On these days, I get more done and I feel confident that I’m focused on the right things because I’ve dealt with the cognitive dissonance upfront.
In a prior post “Four critical components of setting great goals,” I wrote about setting long-term goals. When it comes to daily planning sessions, it’s important to decide on on 1) an achievable outcome, and 2) the required behavior input. This allows you to create an achievable to-do list, that you’ll be able to accomplish and be happy with completing by the end of the day.
Using reliable systems to keep things out of your head.
Implicit in all of the examples above are systems outside of my own brain to plan and schedule work. I use different systems depending on the context:
If the task is something that’s better done at a particular time-of-day, using a calendar app is a great way to plan when it will fit into your schedule.
If I’m on-the-go, I set a reminder using Siri or whatever voice-based assistant is available on your phone
Otherwise, a simple to-do list goes a long way.
Personally, I like to keep these systems convenient and simple. For my to-do list, I use Trello. It provides me a simple list view that allows me to plan the tasks that I’ll work on “Today,” “This Week,” or “Later.” During a daily planning session, I’ll review and update the tasks I plan to tackle. If there are particular tasks that need to be done at a particular time of day, I put a block on my calendar to focus on them.
Throughout the day there will always be ideas and to-dos that creep into your head regardless of how well you’ve designed your focus systems. When those come up, I’ve found that the best thing to do is to put those into one of these external systems. For example, the idea for this post came to me as I was driving to the airport. I used Siri to set a phone reminder. I was then able to keep focused on the task at-hand (driving, very important) without being distracted by the thought that “I need to remember this during my next writing block.” When I was home later on, the reminder popped up and I transferred it to my Trello to-do list.
You can proactively remove cognitive dissonance and work more efficiently.
Removing distractions and cognitive dissonance increases your efficiency. Ultimately, it comes down to being decisive. When you make decisions about what’s important, you can give your full attention to whatever it is you are doing. These decisions can be reactive (do I reply to this email) or proactive (planning your day).
Recommendation: Turn as many decisions as you can into proactive decisions to improve your focus and efficiency. Instead of reacting to emails or notifications as they happen, plan blocks of focus time to read them. You can enable this by turning off notifications for anything that’s not time-sensitive. For proactive decisions, deal with indecision up-front to work more confidently and efficiently.
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