Free to Focus Read online

  Now that you know about the Freedom Compass, keep your eyes on true north. Do your best to move in the direction right for you using the tools in this book. Be patient along the way. A compass is a guide, not a bull’s-eye. It’s a pointer, not the point. Maybe there’s something you love to do and have aptitude for, but you need to develop proficiency. Or maybe you’re perfectly capable and want to find something that stokes your fire. That’s fine. Use the Development Zone as a way station where you can put things that you’re unsure about but suspect might be important to your business someday, especially if they can improve the results you know you’re supposed to produce.

  But here’s a question: If productivity simply comes down to doing more things in your Desire Zone and less of everything else, why aren’t most of us doing that already? Why does this so often seem like an impossible goal?

  Limiting Beliefs, Liberating Truths

  The biggest obstacle in our efforts to become productive may very well be our mindset. We don’t intend for this to happen, but our lives become driven by a collection of beliefs we have about ourselves and our situation. These are limiting beliefs, because they limit our potential and establish false, constricting boundaries that prevent us from accomplishing bigger and better things. We could fill a whole book with limiting beliefs, but let’s zero in on the seven that most impact our efforts to become more productive.

  1. “I just don’t have enough time.” The limiting belief I hear more than anything else is “I just don’t have enough time.” Said another way, it’s “I’m too busy.” I’ve heard this from every type of person in every walk of life, from CEOs to business professionals, construction workers, stay-at-home moms, and college students. It’s a universal truth: we all feel too busy. If you’re struggling with this limiting belief, replace it with this liberating truth: I have all the time I need to accomplish what matters most. Take a fresh look at the great accomplishments taking place around you and the individuals leading major change in the world. Remind yourself that you have the same 168 hours a week that they do, and you too can accomplish great things in the time you have.

  2. “I’m just not that disciplined.” People who view productivity in terms of a massive, complicated system full of tagging, filing, tweaking, and listing a million different tasks usually face the limiting belief “I’m just not that disciplined.” If that describes you, replace it with this liberating truth: Working in my Desire Zone doesn’t require much discipline. We usually don’t complain about not having enough discipline when it comes to spending time on things we enjoy. We reserve the word discipline for those things we don’t want to do. It’s a matter of focus. If you design your life so that you spend most of your time working on things you are passionate about and proficient at, the discipline to do those things comes easily.

  3. “I’m not really in control of my time.” Not everyone is a CEO, self-employed, or even in management. Most of your day may be dictated by your boss or even your family’s schedules. However, we too often use these demands as an excuse to throw up our hands and say, “I’m not in control of my time, so it won’t work.” If you fall victim to this limiting belief, replace it with this liberating truth: I have the ability to make better use of the time I do control. You are not a passive object floating through life, completely at the mercy of outside forces. You have a say in how you live your own life. Pockets of time may be under someone else’s control, but you still have control over the rest. Make it count.

  4. “Highly productive people are just born that way.” Sometimes we let ourselves off the hook by saying something like, “Highly productive people are just born that way. I wasn’t.” This one is just flat-out false. The people you admire most in the world, the people who are achieving great things, were not born with superhuman abilities. They simply found a way to develop their own potential—and you can too. If you fall victim to this limiting belief, replace it with this liberating truth: Productivity is a skill I can develop. This book will show you how to do just that.

  5. “I tried before, and it didn’t work.” I wish I had a nickel for every time someone excused their lack of productivity by saying, “I tried that before, and it didn’t work.” That is definitely not the mantra of high-achievers. In fact, high-achievers never give up simply because one solution failed. Instead, they keep looking for what will work, and they don’t stop until they find it. If you’ve been discouraged by the things that have failed so far, replace that limiting belief with this liberating truth: I can get better results by trying a different approach. That’s why I created the Free to Focus system in the first place—none of the other productivity systems I tried ever worked for me. This one does.

  6. “My circumstances won’t allow it right now, but they’re only temporary.” Of all the limiting beliefs we’re discussing, the deadliest may be “My circumstances won’t allow it right now, but they’re just temporary. I’ll be more productive later.” This belief, even though it seems reasonable and hopeful for the future, can wreck any chance you have of ever becoming more productive. What is temporary will eventually become permanent unless you change something now. Maybe you’re facing a busy quarter at work, a heavy season of your children’s extracurricular activities, or an unusual uptick in your social or community commitments. Whatever it is, heed this warning: It is not temporary. These busy seasons keep redrawing the boundary lines around our time, and things will never go “back to normal.” It’s up to you to define what you want normal to look like; if you do not take control of your time, someone else will. We cannot keep postponing our progress. Instead, we need to embrace this liberating truth: I don’t have to wait until my circumstances change to get started and make progress. If you wait for the perfect time to become more productive and pursue the freedom you crave, you’ll be waiting forever. You can start making positive changes right now, regardless of your circumstances.

  7. “I’m not good with technology.” You may struggle with the limiting belief that says, “I’m not good with technology or complicated systems.” We’re all looking for a simple, elegant solution—and that’s honestly hard to find in the world of productivity. If you find yourself scratching your head at the multitude of different, complicated productivity apps, tools, and systems out there, embrace this liberating truth: True productivity doesn’t require complex technology or systems. It’s more about aligning my daily activities with my priorities, and I can do that. Anyone can do that, in fact, but it begins with believing you can.

  These are the seven limiting beliefs I’ve heard most often over the years, but the list is by no means exhaustive. In fact, many new limiting beliefs may have popped into your head as you read through these. Our mindset is something we often overlook on our way to becoming more productive, but that oversight can undermine even our best efforts if we aren’t careful. If you don’t address the voices in your head, you’ll never get a clear picture of where you are now, which means you’ll never be able to navigate to where you want to go.3

  Limiting Beliefs Liberating Truths

  I just don’t have enough time. I have all the time I need to accomplish what matters most.

  I’m just not that disciplined. Working in my Desire Zone doesn’t require much discipline.

  I’m not really in control of my time. I have the ability to make better use of the time I do control.

  Highly productive people are just born that way. Productivity is a skill I can develop.

  I tried before, and it didn’t work. I can get better results by trying a different approach.

  My circumstances won’t allow it right now, but they’re only temporary. I don’t have to wait until my circumstances change to get started and make progress.

  I’m not good with technology. True productivity doesn’t require complex technology or systems. It’s more about aligning my daily activities with my priorities, and I can do that.

  The goal of this chapter has been to guide you in evaluating your current situation. For
some, this can be the hardest part of the Free to Focus process. But it’s central to everything that follows. Once you finish the following exercise, we have one final action to complete Step 1. It’s time to talk about rejuvenation.

  REDIRECT YOUR TASKS

  Evaluating your current position is a vital step toward your productivity goals, but it’s one many people skip. If you don’t take a hard, honest look at where you are and how you got there, you’ll never be able to move ahead as far and as fast as you want to.

  Use the Task Filter and Freedom Compass worksheet at FreeToFocus.com/tools. List your regular tasks and activities on the Task Filter. Once you’ve got your list, evaluate each item by passion and proficiency. Then use that insight to determine to which zone each task belongs. (Ignore the Eliminate, Automate, and Delegate columns for now; we’ll come back to those later.)

  Once you’ve categorized your tasks, take an extra minute to transfer them to your Freedom Compass, listing each task in its appropriate zone. Place any Development Zone activities in the center. Post your completed Freedom Compass where you’ll see it often and use it as a reminder to focus on Desire Zone activities as much as possible.

  3

  Rejuvenate

  Reenergize Your Mind and Body

  Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

  ANNE LAMOTT

  University of Pennsylvania professor Alexandra Michel, a former Goldman-Sachs employee, conducted a twelve-year study of investment bankers who regularly worked between 100 and 120 hours a week. There are only 168 hours in a week. As we saw in chapter 1, entrepreneurs, executives, and other professionals already steal time from the margins with fifty-plus-hour workweeks. To work 120 hours means shortchanging everything else in life: sleep, relationships, exercise, recreation, spiritual and community activities, and more. To offset the loss, the bankers’ employer offered them round-the-clock administrative aid, meal and laundry services, and other domestic assistance.

  Given their singular focus, the bankers were highly productive at the start. They came in with energy and vigor, took advantage of the extra services their employer provided, and worked hard and long, making huge strides. But it didn’t last. It couldn’t last.

  “Starting in year four, bankers started to experience sometimes debilitating physical and psychological breakdowns,” Michel reported. “They suffered from chronic exhaustion, insomnia, back and body pain, autoimmune diseases, heart arrhythmias, addictions, and compulsions, such as eating disorders, causing them to exhibit diminished judgment and ethical sensitivity.” As their performance plummeted, Michel said, “They simply compensated for their diminishing output by working longer, which caught them in a cycle of escalating work hours and chronic physical and emotional distress.”1

  We’re chasing our tails when we try this approach. Jack Nevison, founder of New Leaf Project Management, crunched the numbers from several different studies on long work hours. He found there’s a ceiling. Push past fifty hours of work in a week and there’s no productivity gain for the extra time. In fact, it goes backwards. One of the studies he examined found that fifty hours on the job only produced about thirty-seven hours of useful work. At fifty-five hours, it dropped to almost thirty. The more you work beyond a fifty-hour threshold, according to this study, the less productive you become. Nevison calls this the Rule of Fifty.2

  That means, based on the number of hours most of us work, we’re on the edge of working backwards if we’re not doing so already. UC Berkeley management professor Morten T. Hansen compares overlong hours to squeezing an orange. “At first,” he says, “you get a lot of liquid. But as you continue to squeeze and your knuckles turn white, you extract a drop or two. Eventually, you reach the point where you’re squeezing as hard as you can, but producing no juice.”3 In one revealing study, managers found no measurable difference between the performance of workers who clocked 80 hours a week and those who simply faked it; the additional hours resulted in no real productivity gains.4 By working to the point of exhaustion, we are achieving less by doing more—the opposite of what we want. To achieve more by doing less, though, we must let go of some of our closely held misconceptions about time and energy.

  Time is fixed, but energy can flex. That means there’s an inverse relationship between hours worked and the productive expense of your energy. The more hours you work, the less productive you’ll be.

  The bankers fell prey to a common productivity myth: that energy is fixed, but time can flex. They believed they could get a consistent return on their effort while expanding their hours—that they’d be just as smart, strong, and engaged at 100 hours as they were at 50. Here’s Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, in a classic statement of the fallacy: “If other people are putting in 40-hour workweeks and you’re putting in 100-hour workweeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing . . . you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.”5 But the bankers and Musk have it exactly backwards. One hundred hours of work is qualitatively, not merely quantitatively, different than fifty. Time is fixed, but energy can flex. Every day contains the same number of hours, while your energy swings up and down depending on multiple variables, including rest, nutrition, and emotional health.

  Most of us know this intuitively. When we’re fresh in the morning, we can accomplish twice as much as we do after lunch. That’s energy flexing. The good news is that you can make your energy flex in your favor so you get the most juice for the least squeeze. That’s what this action, Rejuvenate, is all about. Personal energy is a renewable resource, replenished by seven basic practices. We must:

  Sleep

  Eat

  Move

  Connect

  Play

  Reflect

  Unplug

  Let’s start by looking at the first.

  Practice 1: Sleep

  Eulogizing one of his top executives, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner said, “Sleep was one of [his] enemies. [He] thought it kept him from performing flat out 100 percent of the time. There was always one more meeting he wanted to have. Sleep, he thought, kept him from getting things done.”6 We all buy into that myth at times, but it’s nothing to celebrate. We convince ourselves we can squeeze one more meeting or task into the day if we get up earlier or go down later. It’s pervasive.

  On average Americans get just under seven hours of sleep each night.7 And that number, already below the recommended eight, is probably overstated because people usually report the time they spend in bed, not the hours they actually sleep. We get about 20 percent less sleep than we think, according to researchers.8 And that’s the average! In the business world, we boast about getting even less.

  Leaders at PepsiCo, Southwest, Fiat Chrysler, Twitter, and Yahoo! have all claimed to thrive on half the recommended amount of sleep.9 The bragging rights go up as the time in bed goes down, creating a self-imposed expectation among entrepreneurs and leaders at every level. If you want to be among the best and brightest, you’re supposed to be superhuman. But we’re not superhuman. Two-thirds of leaders in one survey expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of sleep they get, and more than half lamented low-quality sleep.10 It comes at a high cost.

  We treat the pillow like the enemy of productivity, but skipping sleep ultimately hurts our work. The Lancet, for instance, studied surgeons who stayed awake twenty-four hours. The doctors made more mistakes, and routine tasks took them 14 percent longer. The impairment was on par with being intoxicated.11 And it doesn’t take one all-nighter for those kinds of results. In another study, people getting just six hours a night for two straight weeks functioned as if they were legally drunk.12 Rather than boosting productivity, we’re ensuring our own failure when we rob our rest.

  Nightly rejuvenation is the foundation of productivity. Sufficient sleep keeps us mentally sharp and improves our ability to remember, learn, and grow. It refreshes our emotional state, reduces stress, and recharges our bodies. Mea
nwhile, going without sleep makes it harder to stay focused, solve problems, make good decisions, or even play nice with others.13 As neuroscientist Penelope A. Lewis explains, “Sleep-deprived people come up with fewer original ideas and also tend to stick with old strategies that may not continue to be effective.”14

  That’s precisely why effective leaders and entrepreneurs stress getting adequate sleep. Consider Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “Eight hours of sleep makes a big difference for me,” he told Thrive Global. “That’s the needed amount to feel energized and excited.”15 Aetna chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini actually offers cash incentives for employees to prioritize their sleep. “You can’t be prepared if you’re half-asleep,” he explained in an interview. “Being [fully] present in the workplace and making better decisions has a lot to do with our business fundamentals.”16

  Rejuvenating rest comes down to two things: quantity and quality. Adults—regardless of what’s on their calendars or who is demanding their time and attention—require seven to ten hours of sleep a night to perform at their peak. You need to give yourself permission to sleep as much as you find necessary to be at your best. Admittedly, that can be difficult. If your schedule is packed, you might need to sacrifice time on Facebook or Netflix (“We’re competing with sleep,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has admitted).17 If you have young children, you and your partner may need to sleep in shifts or even hire an overnight babysitter occasionally to ensure undisturbed rest. You might even consider going to bed at the same time your kids do for a few nights to get some extra zzz’s.