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  We’ll come back to Matt’s story later. For now it’s enough to say, the important question is not, Can I do this job faster, easier, and cheaper? It’s, Should I be doing this job at all? Getting clear on that question is more important now than ever, as technology gives us unprecedented access to information, other people, and, of course, our work. We can now work wherever and whenever we want. Our technological marvels haven’t made things better. In fact, they’ve made things worse. The promise of the smartphone was that it would make it easier for us to get our work done, improve efficiency, and give us more time to focus on things that matter. But has your smartphone or tablet magically given you more free time? I bet it’s done just the opposite.

  Theoretically, we can be more efficient than at any other time in history. As recently as fifteen years ago, most people wouldn’t have been able to imagine all we can do today with the supercomputers in our pockets. We can call, email, schedule, manage tasks, videoconference, review spreadsheets, create documents, read reports, message clients, book trips, order supplies, create presentations, and do practically anything else right from our phones. We can close deals between stoplights and check invoices while waiting in line at the grocery store—and you don’t even have to wait in line because you can just order those groceries from an app.

  I love tech. I’m a certifiable geek! But I understand tech a lot better now than I did early on. New tech solutions may enable us to work faster, but more significantly, that efficiency brings with it the temptation and expectation to work more. We take all the time we save with efficiency hacks and use it to squeeze even more tasks into our days. We’ve figured out a way to speed up our own conveyor belts, and now we’re drowning in chocolates with no place left to stuff the overflow.

  Objective 2: Success

  If efficiency isn’t the best goal for our productivity efforts, what about increasing our success?

  It seems reasonable to assume improved productivity will lead to greater success, right? Well, sort of. Pursuing the vague notion of success in and of itself can lead us into trouble. The problem is, most of us have never stopped to define what success means. It’s like running a race with no finish line or leaving for a trip without knowing where we want to end up. With no clear destination, how will we ever know when we’ve arrived? This is especially problematic here in America, where we too often buy into the more myth. We strive for more products, more deliverables, more clients, more profits. That enables us to acquire more stuff: more houses, more toys, more expensive vacations, more cars. This, in turn, can lead to even more work, more stress, and ultimately, more burnout.

  Roy is another of my coaching clients. He’s a national account manager for a major lumber company, and this was his struggle. “As measured in our industry, I was pretty productive, but I wasn’t meeting my own goals, and I had reached a major plateau,” he told me. “I was exhausted, I was worn out, I was stressed out and still not accomplishing my goals. So I tried working harder.” Already clocking seventy hours a week—sometimes more—Roy thought the only thing that could deliver success was more hustle.

  “I just felt like if I kept pushing through I would get to the other side, and it just wasn’t true. I really thought more time and hours would help me accomplish my goals, and they just pushed me further into almost burnout.” The emotional toll showed up first in his family but then extended to work itself. His ability to work well with his colleagues suffered. He admitted, “I was drained when I started the day and drained when I ended.”

  It’s a vicious cycle, and it is taking a toll on far more of us than just Roy. According to Gallup, the average American workweek is closer to fifty hours than forty. And one in five works sixty hours or more.2 You might think it’s blue-collar workers who clock the longest shifts, but no. It’s professionals and office workers who rack up the most hours.3 In one study of a thousand professionals, nearly all—94 percent—said they clocked fifty hours or more each week. Nearly half that number worked more than sixty-five. Factor in long commutes, family commitments, and other demands, and even marginally overstuffed schedules cause us to steal time from the margins; the same study found professionals spend about twenty to twenty-five hours each week out of the office monitoring work on their smartphones.4

  We are living in a period of what German philosopher Josef Pieper called “total work,” where labor drives life, not the other way around.5 And the results are, honestly, depressing. More than half of employees say they’re fried, 40 percent work weekends at least once a month, a quarter keep plugging away after hours, and half say they can’t even leave their desks for a break.6 When Kronos Incorporated and Future Workplace checked with more than six hundred human resources leaders, 95 percent said burnout is undermining their employee retention efforts. They identified low pay, long hours, and heavy workloads as the three biggest contributors.7 Unsurprisingly, a recent Global Benefits Attitudes Survey of workers found stressed employees have significantly higher absentee and lower productivity rates than their happier, healthier peers.8 Most sobering of all, researchers say workplace stress factors in at least 120,000 deaths per year in the US alone.9 During the 1970s in Japan the problem was so acute, they coined a word for it: karoshi, “death by overwork.”10

  Clearly, if our goal in increasing productivity is to achieve some vague notion of “success,” we aren’t doing it right. Sick, dead, or dying doesn’t sound successful to me. We aren’t robots. We need time off, rest, time with family, leisure, play, and exercise. We need big chunks of time when we aren’t thinking about work at all, when it’s not even on our radar. Sometimes, though, the relentless pursuit of “success” keeps us always on, always engaged, and always available. This is a recipe for failure for both you and your employer. Yes, success is a powerful motivator—but only if you understand what success truly means to you.

  Objective 3: Freedom

  If productivity isn’t fundamentally about improving efficiency and increasing success, then what is the goal? Why should we bother? That brings us to the real objective, and Free to Focus’s underlying foundation: productivity should free you to pursue what’s most important to you. The goal, the true objective of productivity, should be freedom. I define freedom four ways.

  1. Freedom to Focus. If you want to master your schedule, increase your efficiency and output, and create more margin in your life for the things you care about, you’ve got to learn how to focus. I’m talking about the ability to zero in and do the deep work that creates a significant impact, work that moves the needle in a big way. You want your work to solve actual problems in your world, to send you to bed every night knowing exactly what you accomplished and what progress you made toward your goals.

  Think back over the last couple of weeks. How much of your time were you free to focus—truly concentrate—on your work? To sit down and attack one task with absolute attention: no distractions, no calls or texts or emails, nobody dropping in to say hi or to ask you a question about something that really didn’t matter to you? If you’re like most of us, I doubt you’ve had much time like that at all recently. Even when we try to hide by working offsite, whether it’s at home or a coffee shop, the always-on accessibility of the smartphone and computer leaves an open door to a million different distractions.

  As we’ve already seen, the average employee faces a distraction every three minutes. Later in the book, we’ll explore what impact each of those little interruptions has on our ability to focus. Here’s a hint: it’s not good. And if you just realized that you are almost never focused on one task for more than three minutes at a time, don’t get discouraged. You’re not alone. This entire system is designed to bring you the focus you’ve been missing. Trust me, we’ll get there.

  2. Freedom to Be Present. How many date nights have you spent thinking about, talking about, or worrying about work? How often do you check your work email or messages when you’re out with your family or friends? The statistics we’ve already seen paint a pretty ble
ak picture of our ability to unplug from the office and focus on our relationships, health, and personal well-being. Even when we’re not technically working, we still drag all our unresolved tasks around.

  When we can’t get free of our work obligations, we can’t be fully present to our family and friends or take the necessary downtime. The Onion satirized the problem in a piece headlined “Man on Cusp of Having Fun Suddenly Remembers Every Single One of His Responsibilities.” Attending a friend’s cookout, the man was “tantalizingly close to kicking back” but then remembered “work emails that still needed to be dealt with, looming deadlines for projects . . . and phone calls that needed to be returned.” After “teetering on the brink of actually having fun,” he “was now mentally preparing for a presentation.”11 We laugh because it’s true.

  I’m not interested in efficiency that only gives me more time to work longer hours or success that drives me to work when I should be playing. I’m after productivity, not efficiency, which means ensuring significant margin that enables me to be fully present wherever I am. When I’m at work, that means I’m fully present at work. When I’m at dinner with my wife, Gail, that means I’m fully present with her. The important people in my life deserve the very best of me, and I don’t want to shortchange them just so I can spend extra time and energy worrying about work.

  3. Freedom to Be Spontaneous. This may sound silly to some, but I have always prioritized the freedom to be spontaneous. So many of us have our lives meticulously planned out to the last minute, and we won’t tolerate any interruptions or deviations. That doesn’t sound like an enjoyable way to go through life. Instead, imagine being able to drop whatever you’re doing if your kids or grandkids walked in to say hello. That kind of spontaneity only happens when you create margin in your life, and that is the byproduct of real productivity. When you know you have the most important tasks covered and prevent yourself from taking on more than you can comfortably handle, you’ll discover the freedom to be spontaneous.

  4. Freedom to Do Nothing. We’re always on, and we consider it a virtue. But as we’ll see, our always-on culture actually undermines our productivity. It also undermines our joy. When Gail and I visited Tuscany, we discovered la dolce far niente—the sweetness of doing nothing. It’s a national skill in Italy. Americans usually feel guilty doing nothing. Admittedly, I sometimes feel unproductive in the middle of non-task time. But that’s the point.

  Our brains aren’t designed to run nonstop. When we drop things into neutral, ideas flow on their own, memories sort themselves out, and we give ourselves a chance to rest. If you think about it, most of your breakthrough ideas in your business or personal life come when you’re relaxed enough to let your mind wander. Creativity depends on times of disengagement, which means doing nothing from time to time is a competitive advantage.

  Getting the Right Things Done

  The kind of freedom I’m talking about may sound inconceivable to you right now, but I promise, it’s possible. The first action on the path to becoming free to focus is to get clear on your objective. We’ve already seen that the best objective should be to free yourself to focus on what matters most to you. As I’ve said already, productivity is not about getting more things done; it’s about getting the right things done. That’s what this book is all about—to help you achieve more by doing less.

  How do we define less? The rest of this book will answer that question, but basically, we’re talking about cutting away all the tasks that currently eat up your time that you are not passionate about, that are not important to you, and, frankly, that you’re not any good at. Amazing things happen when you start focusing primarily on what you do best and eliminate or delegate the rest. You’ll experience greater motivation, better results, more margin, and genuine satisfaction in your work and your life.

  Far too often we tailor our lives to our work, meaning we allow our work to sit in the middle of our schedules like a whale in a bathtub. Then we try to squeeze everything else in our lives around it. I think we’ve got it backward. We should design our lives first and then tailor our work to meet our lifestyle objectives. It’s not far-fetched. I work with hundreds of entrepreneurs and executives each year who do this and hear from thousands more moving that direction. The result is not only improved work but also greater satisfaction across the board.

  For this reason companies, including major corporations, have been experimenting with cutting hours and expanding employee choice. They’re seeing the payoff. One Toyota plant in Sweden cut shifts down to six hours. Not only were employees able to complete the same amount of work in six hours that previously required eight, but they were happier, turnover went down, and profits went up.12

  We’ve known this for a long time. In 1926, Henry Ford made Ford Motors one of the first companies in the US to switch from a six-day workweek to the five-day, forty-hour model we’re so familiar with today. At the time, it seemed crazy to business analysts, but Ford was a visionary. As his son and Ford Motors president Edsel Ford explained to the New York Times, “Every man needs more than one day a week for rest and recreation. . . . We believe that in order to live properly every man should have more time to spend with his family.”13

  Of course, these changes boosted Ford Motors’ team morale, but many were surprised at the impact to the bottom line of the business. Productivity skyrocketed. The factory workers had a renewed appreciation for their company and more energy for their work. In the end, with their hours reduced to forty per week and getting entire weekends off, employees actually produced more by working less, taking Ford Motors to even greater heights.14

  What’s Your Vision?

  Why start by stopping to discuss our productivity vision? Because jumping to tips, hacks, and apps won’t address the most basic issue. The core problem is within ourselves, and it’s something we’ve struggled with for centuries. Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea in modern-day Turkey, addressed it in the fourth century. “I have indeed left my life in the city,” he said, after moving to a monastery, “but I have not yet been able to leave myself behind.” Basil compared it to a person who gets seasick on a big ship and tries to find relief by moving to a dinghy. Doesn’t work. Instead, he just brings his seasickness with him. The problem, according to Basil, is this: “We carry our indwelling disorders about with us, and so are nowhere free from the same sort of disturbances.”15

  Most of us view shiny new productivity solutions like the seasick man climbing into the dinghy. Relief, finally! But they won’t help. We think we can solve our problems by moving to a new app or device, but we’re simply dragging our core productivity problems along with us. Doing something different, something better, requires rethinking productivity. If we’re gunning for greater efficiency or success as the main goal, we’ll fail. Productivity should ultimately give you back more time, not require more of you.

  My most productive coaching clients pursue the third objective: freedom. What’s more, they have a specific vision for what that looks like in their lives. They start with a picture of what they want their lives to look like before they try to fit their jobs into it. They know where they’re headed. Importantly, they don’t have any special power you don’t. They’ve got agency, and you do too. You get to choose. So, what’s it going to be? The endgame is different for everyone, but I hope you are at least starting to formulate a vision for what fewer, more productive work hours could make possible for you. What will you do with the extra time you’re going to free up in your life?

  Ask yourself what you want, how many hours you want to work, how many items you want on your task list, how many nights and weekends you want to work. What do you want to focus on? Maybe you want to devote more time to work that drives results. There’s nothing wrong with this if that’s truly what you want. Or maybe you want to devote more time to other life domains, such as spirituality, intellectual pursuits, family, friends, hobbies, community, or something else entirely. It’s completely up to you; no one else can—or should�
��tell you what matters most to you. Once you figure it out, hold on to that why for dear life. It will be the star that guides your ship through this exciting voyage; without it, you’ll get lost. That’s what productivity gives you: the freedom to choose what you want to focus your time and energy on.

  Once you complete the following Productivity Vision exercise, you’ll be ready for the next chapter. There, you’ll have the chance to evaluate how far you’ve already come toward achieving your vision and where you need to go from here.

  CREATE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY VISION

  Formulating a new vision for your life is going to require some serious thinking on your part. You need to be able to picture it in your head and get crystal clear on what you want your life to look like and why it matters to you. To get started, complete the Productivity Vision at FreeToFocus.com/tools. Start by defining what your productivity ideal looks like. Then break it down into a few powerful, memorable words. Finally, clarify the stakes by outlining exactly what you stand to gain if you achieve that vision and what you will lose if you don’t.

  Remember, this is a vision for what your life could look like. You probably don’t have the resources to fully realize your vision today, but don’t let that stop you from dreaming. is designed to help you start making progress toward your destination, and you’ll never make any real progress if you don’t know where you’re going.

  2

  Evaluate

  Determine Your Course

  Everybody ends up somewhere in life. A few people end up somewhere on purpose.

  ANDY STANLEY

  Before I started my own company, I had the privilege of serving as the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. That was a wonderful opportunity, and it came as the result of many, many years of proving myself by working in the trenches. For example, years before I took the reins as CEO, I was an associate publisher, the second in command of my division. In July of 2000, my boss suddenly resigned, and I was asked to take his job. That made me the general manager of Nelson Books, one of the trade book divisions of Thomas Nelson.