In one of my previous posts I briefly mentioned the importance of focus in building a startup. I believe that being focused is one of the most important skills one develops to achieve things both professionally and personally.
In today’s post I will dig deeper into it.
At Base, “focus” was one of our company values. In the very early days, it was easy to know what was most important and what we needed to work on. Building an MVP, getting first customers, onboarding them. After a short while, however, the situation dramatically changed. The main reason was that we got resources constrained, meaning everyone bit off more than they could chew - in simple words, there was just too much work and not enough people to do things. For some reason I thought it’s a temporary situation, we just need to push hard and everything will get to being “normal” again. Actually my thinking was completely naive; having too many things to work on was apparently a normal situation, and truth be told, the bigger we grew, and the more people joined the team, the more it felt like there was even more work.
The amount of things we could work on was proportional to our growth. The more customers we won, the more feedback and requests we received, the more people we hired to address that feedback, the better and more robust the product has become, which led to even more customers (typically larger and more demanding) starting to use the product and the cycle repeats.
So, professionally, I think it’s just hard to focus on things, especially when one works in a company which grows fast.
However for me, the right focus is also difficult personally. Maybe it’s related to the fact that I find it difficult to be patient, but I’m not sure that’s the main cause really. Too many times, I wanted to accomplish something, I was motivated and certain that it’s the right thing to do, but for different reasons I just kept procrastinating.
At the same time there is so much joy and satisfaction in achieving things which are important. So why is maintaining the right focus often so difficult?
There are a couple of observations worth mentioning.
Urgent vs Important
Some time ago I bumped into the following Urgent-Important matrix which I found simple and effective. Every task or work can be assigned to one of the four quadrants:
It’s surprisingly easy to prioritize work or tasks which belong to Urgent & Important and Not Urgent & Not Important categories. Everyone is able to maintain perfect focus if all we could focus on are the tasks belonging only to those two categories. When a house is on fire and there is a child in the kitchen - the most important thing is to grab the kid and escape no matter what. It’s urgent and important and it has to be performed now. At the same time refactoring code in a part of a product that no one uses is probably something very few people would go after.
The most challenging categories, which typically deteriorate people’s focus are the two remaining ones: Not Important & Urgent and Important and Not Urgent. These two are confusing, as typically people tend to prioritize things which are urgent over those which are important. As a result, important things are not done or get delayed. Often I would pick up a call from a friend, reply to a whatsapp message, respond to a non-critical email, or ask a colleague an “urgent” question, rather than keep working on a project which needs to be delivered two weeks from now, make sure that I exercise regularly or get enough sleep.
In my time at Base, I faced a recurring challenge as the CPO. One of my key responsibilities was to provide a roadmap. This document was more than just a paper—it guided our team and set expectations for our customers. However, the rapid growth of the company brought many unplanned day-to-day tasks. While these tasks seemed urgent, they often overshadowed the long-term importance of the roadmap. My turning point came when I chose to block out significant time on my calendar exclusively for the roadmap. Declining other tasks during these periods was tough, but it was essential, given the importance of the roadmap.
Consciously categorizing tasks between the troublesome categories helped me maintain better focus.
Being conscious of the direction
The prerequisite of being focused is to know what to focus on. Sounds obvious, but in my opinion understanding what is important and worth pursuing is not easy at all. At least for me it requires a continuous and dedicated effort.
People tend to think about their goals and plans on specific occasions. New Year’s resolutions or reaching a significant birthday are typically good times to think about what's important. It’s similar at work: drafting yearly roadmaps, pitching investors on plans for the following two years. In moments like that it’s natural to stop and think about what should be done.
Unfortunately I don’t think that it works. In order to at least have a chance to be focused I believe that one should constantly evaluate what the focus should be.
I try to evaluate my focus every year, month, and week. It’s a routine for me at this point. There are long term objectives I want to achieve - those are typically yearly. These are high level things like: live a healthy life or be active physically and intellectually. From that every month I try to narrow down the focus and determine what ideally should be addressed in a given month. It could be reading a certain book or eliminating/adding something to a diet. Weekly I try to narrow my focus to things which bring me closer to monthly goals. In a similar manner work related focus can be addressed.
System like this is great, and definitely helpful, however it often exposes my lack of focus rather than ensures constant progress in important areas. Maybe I’m exaggerating as I feel that there is a big room for improvement, however continuous evaluation of what is important has become one of the biggest improvements in maintaining desired focus over time for me.
Multitasking
Multitasking, or working on several things simultaneously, can make it hard to stay focused for a few reasons. First, when you focus on one task at a time, there might be a special moment where everything just "clicks" and you suddenly make a lot of progress. Multitasking can make it really hard to reach these special moments because you're always switching between different things. Second, when you switch between different tasks, you use a lot of energy trying to remember where you left off each time, which doesn't leave much energy to actually move forward with your work. And lastly, sometimes when you really focus on one thing for a while, you enter a "zone" where you can get a lot done quickly. But when you multitask, it's nearly impossible to get into this productive "zone." So, to do your best work, it's better to stick to one task at a time instead of multitasking.
My best performance and progress have always been an outcome of a prolonged focus on one and only one thing. One of the best examples I can think of was a Base implementation for a customer with a team of more than 1K sales people. The main challenge we faced was the granularity of permissions for different people in the organization. The customer was moving over from Salesforce (our biggest competitor) and Salesforce’s permissions model was extremely complex and robust. We had little time to do the transition. For strategic reasons, we never told the customer about potential hitches with our permission implementation. We didn't want to risk losing the deal by highlighting a potential weakness in our system, yet we genuinely believed that permissions wouldn't be a significant issue. Over the course of a few days, getting familiar with Salesforce’s permissions models and coming up with a solution which could work at Base was the goal. We made it. It almost felt like becoming world experts in all possible permissions models in enterprise software over the course of just a few days.
Recently I watched an interview with Walter Isaacson who describes Elon Musk as a “great serial tasker, rather than a multitasker”. It’s an interesting take on the importance of focusing on one thing at a time.
Distractions
This one is the hardest for me because I just haven’t found a really effective way to avoid distractions. The closest I got was by either becoming nocturnal or traveling to a different time zone where it’s much harder to be distracted by others as most people from my social circles sleep during the “focus” time. Unfortunately neither of those methods is sustainable. There is actually a great conversation about productive work and how to avoid distractions in Huberman Lab Podcast with Tim Ferriss.
As previously stated, my most effective strategy to minimize distractions has been to schedule focused work hours early in the morning (when the US team is asleep). I communicate this to the entire team and make a determined effort to decline any unexpected tasks during that period.
To sum it up - focus is hard and requires constant evaluation. At the same time it’s a great area of productivity improvements. It’s always been my Achilles' heel, but over the years, by focusing on focus, I feel I have become much better at it.
The tips I shared in this post can be your starting point; using them has helped me significantly over the years. By learning to concentrate more effectively on the right things at the right times, one can achieve more and ultimately find greater satisfaction.
I’m open to invest and/or help your startup grow. If you have any questions or thoughts don’t hesitate to reach out at bart@founderspond.com or DM me at @kiszal on Twitter.