9 Practical Tips to Increase Your Team’s Focus

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Multitasking is a joke.

It’s the biggest lie of our working lives, but we’re all human. We all fall for it, and pay the price.

But what about your teams?

If there ever was a “hack” for team productivity, this is it. Focus.

Let’s dig in:

Protect your attention like your life depends on it

Before we dig in, let’s define focus. There are thousands of definitions, but they all have in common that you concentrate your interest or activity on something.

This is exactly the same for personal or team focus.

And there’s something hiding in there. Steve Jobs got this right decades ago. Focus is about what you say no to.

Or in language we use every day in projects: prioritize ruthlessly.

On a personal level, on a team level, and as an organization. I often joke that I’m a toddler, and I have 5 fingers to count on. If you give me a 6th task, one has to go.

Sure, you can do two things at the same time. But you can’t fully concentrate on two things. As a result, there’s lots of activity but very little progress.

Task switching is killing your productivity.

In the case of a team, the problem compounds. If everyone is working on a few things at the same time, the number of things that could raise a question or issue grows exponentially.

That means that on top of “disturbing themselves” with multitasking, people also have more reasons to disturb each other.

We all have finite bandwidth, and one of the best things you can do for your team is to manage that.

As project managers, we’re constantly managing time. I’m arguing that some of that time (pun intended) should be used to manage focus.

Manage focus instead of managing time

OK, but how do we put this into practice?

Here are two things you can do today:

First, you can reduce the work in progress within your team. Do less, but do it faster and better. This sounds simple, and it is.

But it’s not easy.

There are little tricks like limiting the number of active tasks or cards that fit on the “in progress” board, or only allowing people to assign their name to two tasks at the same time.

What works best for you depends on your project, context, team, etc. But don’t hide behind thinking that your project is special.

Find what fits your project and protect people against themselves.

As always, the tactics and systems are the easy part. Getting people to actually do it? Not so much.

This is where your leadership skills shine. Lead by example, set clear expectations up front, and give constructive feedback on behavior.

Second, you can reduce the number of interruptions. Here are some practical ideas that some of my clients have implemented successfully:

• Have dedicated “deep work” time blocks or days without meetings.

• Stack interruptions. Plan a recurring meeting right before or after lunch, or two meetings back to back. This gives people longer interruption-free time.

• Prioritize async communication. Does this really have to be answered now, or can it be in a few hours?

• Encourage people to set communication boundaries. No email before 11 AM, focus mode on phones, Slack status for deep work without notifications - endless options.

• Have a 30min “office hour” at the end of the day so that people can ask any question that could prevent them from starting up tomorrow morning. Close all open loops.

• Share calendars and respect them mutually.

• If you get the same question 3x, write it down so that people can help themselves.

• Create a single source of truth so people never have to look (or ask!) for answers.

• When assigning a task, check if the person has and knows everything they need to do to complete it.

On top of that, all personal productivity advice applies. I’m not an expert here by any means, but simply hygiene like zero inbox reduces the number of open loops. If you haven’t read it yet, David Allen’s classic “Getting things done” is an excellent starting point.

Putting it all together

As project managers, we spend our days managing time. But what happens within that time is what produces results. And to enable teams to produce results, you need to manage their focus.

A no to something is a yes to something else. And the shorter your “Yes-list”, the more traction you’ll have. The faster you’ll gather feedback. And the easier it is to get your execution flywheel up and running.

I’m leaving you with a question today. How long is the Yes-list of your team?

And does no really mean no (for now), or is it treated as a maybe?

Your team will thank you for shortening it.

That’ll do for today. Until next Tuesday!
Jasper

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