Focus Pocus
What real focus looks like, hustle culture aside
This newsletter send-out is a special anniversary one - today’s my birthday and I only have 1 year left before I go down (or up?) in blaze or glory like our lord Jesus Christ.
To celebrate, we have a lateral thinking puzzle - made by yours truly with a little help from our other lord, ChatGPT.
A man sits down in a chair. Suddenly, multiple men come into the room and start rearranging the furniture in a flurry. The man is not surprised or bothered by the sudden intrusion. What happened?
An answer, as usual, at the end.
What’s your game?
I remember when I first started working in the comms/marketing industry. The year was 2010 and the only real KPI for career success was putting in long hours.
The catch, though, was that the output didn’t really matter. Some of my most successful peers would put in 60+ hours per week, but very few of their projects would see the light of the day and even fewer could be considered a success from a commercial standpoint.
In any normal business ecosystem, that would be considered an utter failure. But most of the traditional business world doesn’t work by rational standards.
You couldn’t blame them, right? They did the best they could, even went above and beyond, since you’d see them locked and ready at almost any hour of the day.
I followed the same route, since that seemed to be the way to “make it”.
What I realized way too late is that this kind of approach is a great angle if you’re playing a long-term career game. The three main things you need to be aware of in this game are:
Look busy (or put in long hours) and be almost always available
Deliver one project every year or so in order to be able to reference something successful that will confirm that your long hours are indeed warranted
70/30 rule - 70% of your time should be about documenting your efforts (and making sure the chain of command is aware of them), while 30% of your time should be allocated to the actual work going into the project
It might sound like I don’t respect this kind of hustle, but that’s not the case. It’s a game I played for almost a decade without realizing, diligently replicating everything I saw was happening around me.
There’s merit to knowing how the game is played and playing it successfully.
It’s a game that works and it’s a game that has set people up for life.
What I’m advocating for is being aware of the game you’re playing. Almost nobody with a strategy level office job delivers actual efficient, productive work for more than 6 hours a day (and that’s on a crazy busy day). If you don’t believe me, try installing Rize or any other productivity tracking tool.
If you’re down in the trenches doing admin work and have clear tasks you have to execute daily, then yes, your time is maximized for you.
I’ve seen people try to switch from a corporate job to an entrepreneurial one and failing miserably. Mostly because they tried to replicate the same formula that worked for them back in the corporate world.
The problem is that in an entrepreneurial role, your input doesn’t really matter. Your output is the thing that defines success. Being able to quickly pivot from something that doesn’t work to new initiatives. That kind of flexibility isn’t rewarded as heavily in the corporate world.
Are you able to deliver results by working (I mean really working) 4 hours per day? Then you’re in the home stretch.
Where it gets tricky, though, is when you have to define success. Ask yourself what would the company lose if you were to stop working on your project. Could you “fake it” for a while without anyone realizing? If so, you’re not really delivering meaningful output.
An important wake up for me when I switched to the startup mentality was that the hours I put in are irrelevant if the results don’t match the effort. It’s actually even worse - I burned myself out without any meaningful output.
Now I’m trying to see what the lowest effort/maximum impact thing I can do to drive the company (shameless self-promo hyperlink, couldn’t resist) forward.
So make sure that your focus is on the game you’re playing, that you understand its rules and you play it accordingly.
That way, you set yourself up for success.
Answer: the man was an actor in a live theater play. Him sitting down on the chair was the signal for the props team to come in and rearrange the set for the next scene.
If you didn’t get a chance to read the previous newsletter (which is one of my most popular ones), here’s me making your life easier: