Relearning the habit of focus

Just last week, I wrote that the upcoming Christmas holiday in the UK, with many remaining restrictions on what we could do and where we could go, was an opportunity to reinforce or acquire habits of work/life balance, after many months of working from home.

What I didn’t expect was that, with new variants of the virus circulating, restrictions would become even greater.. The Christmas holiday, which already often contains long stretches of unstructured time - particularly that fuzzy period between Christmas Day and New Year - would be even more unscheduled and unstructured, as even our limited plans would have to be cancelled.

Is there any silver lining to be found in the next phase of our evolving situation? If there is, I think it is in the opportunity to relearn the habit of focus: to spend dedicated time on one thing, to the extent that we lose ourselves in it.

Achieving this level of focus has often been difficult for me in a busy working life, but particularly so in 2020, and even more so in recent weeks, for three reasons.

First, focus is a rare and precious commodity in almost any modern workplace, and can become more difficult to find as we progress in our careers. Many of us crave more seniority and more responsibility, but, if we are fortunate enough to attain it, we find that it means that we must spread ourselves more thinly. We discover that we acquire breadth at the expense of depth, and that one of the biggest problems of leadership is finding just enough time for all the things we are accountable for. Context switching is an inevitable part of leadership - and much research has been done to show the impact of context switching on focus and productivity.

Second, even when it is possible to schedule dedicated time to focus on one topic or problem, there are more and more ways for our attention to be interrupted. When I first started my career, the main interruptions would be someone coming to my desk, the phone ringing, or a memo landing in my in-tray (yes, this was at the Dawn of Time, when there was an in-tray rather than a terminal on my desk). Just now, I’ve counted seven connected devices on my desk, all of which can buzz, ring or alert me in many different ways. I can’t complain about the increase in connection: it is a boon, especially when we must be physically separated. But it decreases the time between interruptions, especially when we are physically separated, and we feel that we should respond to all chances for human contact.

Third, it is increasingly easy and tempting for me to interrupt myself. All of those connected devices don’t just provide ways for people to interact with me, they provide ways for me to interact with the world - or at least to try to find out what is going on. And there has been a lot going on this year. It is not surprising that the term ‘doomscrolling’ has entered the vocabulary, and I have found myself guilty of doomscrolling compulsively through many of the slowly unfolding challenges we have lived through this year.

On top of all of these disruptions to focus, I have also been reminded that focus is a habit, and, like all habits, it is one we must practice if we wish to strengthen it. Recently, the Google Cloud team adopted a practice of low meeting Fridays: we would still spend time with customers on Fridays,, but would attempt to limit our internal meetings as much as possible. This was a welcome move, and I was grateful to see a few hours of white space in my diary each Friday, rather than a continuous series of short meetings. I had many things to do, and now I had time in which to do them. But I was surprised at how much effort it took to decide what the highest priority task was, and to stick to it, without external or self-inflicted interruptions. I had to relearn a habit which had been eroded by years of management practice, by living in a continuously connected world, and by working through a year of rolling news.

I would much prefer a normal, frantic Christmas in a normal, frantic year. But we can't have that, so, as well as providing us with an opportunity to reinforce the habits of work/life balance, I am hoping that this unexpectedly quiet Christmas will give me a chance to reinforce the habit of focus too - and not just focus on work and personal projects, but to focus on those around me.

Best wishes for the season, and for the health and well-being of all.