The Executive Asking What to Focus On

The list grows, the day shrinks

The question usually arrives late in the evening. The screen is still open, the count of open items is past forty, tomorrow's calendar is already full, and the executive says the same sentence to herself: what should I focus on. It sounds like a practical question and seems to ask for a practical answer. A ranking, a matrix, perhaps a new planning tool. Yet the person asking has usually done the ranking already. What she has not done is live with its result.

Where ranking stops working

Priority matrices share one assumption, which is that some of the items on the list are truly unimportant. In a senior seat that assumption does not hold. Every item was put there by a capable person for a reasonable cause. A customer is waiting, a board member has asked, a colleague needs a sign-off, a project has slipped. Taken one at a time, each of them turns out to matter. Run the matrix and they all land in the upper right corner, and the executive blames the tool and tries the next one.

The trouble is not the order of the list but whose list it is. So when everything looks urgent, the move is not to find a better ranking method. The move is to look at who wrote the list.

The voice of a list

An executive's list is the sum of the requests of the people around her. Behind each item there is a name, and that name will be disappointed when the item is postponed or declined. Setting priorities looks like a technical sorting job, but in practice it means deciding whose disappointment to accept. Until she makes that decision the list does not shorten, because the sentence that would shorten it is one nobody wants to hear.

None of this should be read as laziness or timidity. People work to avoid disappointing others, and good executives do it more than most. But past a certain point that care consumes the time she would have given to her own seat. Everyone who wrote the list has their need met. Only the seat's own work is left undone.

Asking the question this way has another side effect: the answer is always sought elsewhere. The executive turns to a friend, a book or a course and tries to carry a principle back from it. Principles do help, but only once the question has been put in the right place. The real place is where the part of the list that does not belong to her begins, and nobody can say that on her behalf.

For someone inside the pressure this boundary is often invisible. Each day continues the one before, each meeting picks up what the last one left open, and when she finally stops to ask why her seat is so crowded, it is surprising to find that the crowd is her own. Nobody asked her for this much. Everyone asked only for their share, and the shares added up to a weight.

Focus is the edge of what will not be done

Focusing is often understood as looking harder at one thing. Yet looking properly at something means accepting that you will not look at other things. Focus is a subtraction, not an addition, and until the subtracted items are actually dropped they sit inside the focus as an invisible weight. The fatigue of a day spent half-finishing things usually comes less from the work than from not yet having decided what will not be done.

Three kinds of work

The work in front of an executive can be sorted into three groups by who is able to do it. The distinction is simple, which is why it is so rarely made.

• Work only this seat can do: choosing between two good options, deciding who will carry a role, saying why a direction is being abandoned.
• Work others can do but which needs this seat to draw a frame first: what a team is aiming at, to what standard a piece of work should finish.
• Work someone else could do right now, perhaps a little slower or a little differently.

Once the three groups are described, most executives find they give the first a small part of their week and the third the largest. They do not do this by wanting to; the third group is the work that makes the most noise and offers the most sense of closure.

Underrating your own work

The first group has a shared trait: it gives no feedback. Whether a choice was right is known months later, and the cost of dropping a direction is paid a year on. The third group ends the same day, somebody says thanks, the list loses an item. People move toward work that is rewarded quickly. That is not a flaw of character but a feature of how the reward is built, and in a senior seat that design steadily pulls the executive away from her own work.

A practical consequence follows: letting go of something in the third group does not declare it unimportant. A task can matter and still not belong to this seat. When the executive does not say that plainly to herself, every handover feels like a loss and is usually done by halves. The task is passed on but the ownership is not, and a week later it is back. For a handover to hold, the decision has to travel with the task, and when the decision stays the task has not really left.

The second group is the most misunderstood. Here the executive does not do the work but draws the frame: what is being aimed at, what is acceptable, at what point it should come back to her. When the frame is clear the team carries on alone. When it is not, every detail is brought to her and the second group drains into the third. A good part of lost focus comes from a frame that was never drawn.

The easiest way to separate the three is to look back over a week of the calendar. Put a letter beside each meeting and each hour and read the totals. The result tends to be uncomfortable, but the discomfort is what makes it useful, because for once the week is read by the time it took and not by the intentions behind it.

The seat's own work is the least visible work, and for that reason it is the first to be sacrificed. Executives are often surprised when they see it, because in the middle of the pressure they have always thought of themselves as busy with important things. They are. It is only not the work that this seat is meant to do.

A choice has not been made until the cost of what was left is visible

Most approaches to focus explain what to choose and pass quickly over what to leave. Yet a choice is tested at what it leaves behind. An executive who says she will concentrate on a single subject this week should also be able to say which subjects will wait, who will be waiting, and what the waiting will cost. If she cannot, what exists is an intention, not a choice.

The price of not saying no

We wrote earlier in this series that every yes is a no given somewhere else. On the question of focus the reverse also holds: every no left unsaid is a yes given quietly. When an executive does not decline a request she has not accepted it either; she has only left the date of acceptance unclear. The person who asked waits, she carries it in her head, and both sides sustain an uncertainty that is owed an answer, sometimes for years.

The most expensive part of that uncertainty is the mark it leaves on her attention. Every postponed but undeclined item stays in the mind as a small open tab. A person working with forty open tabs cannot look properly at any one of them. Lost focus often comes not from doing too much but from carrying unfinished decisions.

Another name for freezing

In the leader who cannot decide we argued that indecision comes less from missing information than from a missing price. The same mechanism runs in the question of focus. The executive does not fail to know what to focus on; much of the time she knows. What she cannot do is say what that knowledge will cost, and to whom. Until the cost is named the choice stays on paper and the day runs as it did before.

A daily example. An executive spends her evening giving a team's presentation a last review. The deck is good, the team is capable, the correction is small. But that evening a choice that only she can make, say which market will be left this year, is postponed once more. The review feels like real work and it is good work; it simply belongs to another seat.

The questions that help here are small ones. What happens if this closes tomorrow without me. Who is harmed if I put this choice off for another week. Which request is quietly solving itself because I did not answer. None of them calls for a large analysis, but each one points to a place in the list that had not been looked at before.

To focus on one thing is to take on, openly, the price of another. An executive who can do that is not troubled by the length of her list, because she knows which part of it is not hers.

One question a week leads to one decision a week

Focus is not a decision taken once and finished. It is an arrangement that has to be rebuilt every week, and the rebuilding needs no large system. A small, regular question is enough: which decision I can make this week will make many of the others unnecessary.

How one question works

The question does not rank the list; it looks for a knot inside it. Often an executive sees that among ten items in the week one is in fact standing in front of the others. A team's authority is unclear, so nine different requests are waiting for approval. The owner of a product is unknown, so nine different meetings are discussing the same subject. When the knot is untied most of the others close without needing her attention. Seeing the knot means looking not at the list but at the structure behind it.

An account of what waits

Once the week's one decision is chosen, a short account is drawn up of what will wait. It is not for the executive but for the people who must wait, and it holds two things: what will wait and until when. Saying it aloud is hard, because it brings the disappointment forward. But a deferral that has been spoken is a decision; one that has not been spoken is read as neglect. In both cases the work waits the same time. What changes is the relationship between the person waiting and the executive.

There is also a limit to this arrangement, and it should be named at the start. The week's one decision does not have to be the week's only work; the executive will still attend meetings and answer messages. What changes is that the day ends with a measure: did I take one step today toward the seat's own work. If the answer is no the day is not counted as bad, but it is known to have been a choice, not an accident.

Over time the account shows something else: which requests never come back. Some tasks, once postponed, are left without an owner and nobody mentions them again. They show the real weight of the list, because they were never truly needed. They were only not yet asked for loudly enough.

The strength of the arrangement is that it does not demand perfection. Some weeks the one decision cannot be made, and some weeks the account of waiting is longer than expected. That is not the arrangement failing but what it shows: the tension between the work requested of the seat and the seat's own work can now be named, and a tension that can be named can be managed.

With time each executive finds her own rhythm. For some it is half an hour of silence on Monday morning; for others a short accounting on Friday afternoon. The form does not matter. What matters is that the question is asked regularly and the answer is written somewhere, because focus that is not written down is the first thing sacrificed at the next urgent request.

The first product of focus is not a plan but a stated list of what will wait. When the executive can write that list the day is still busy, but the busyness is no longer scattered. It is chosen.

From the room

Executives who come to us with this question usually look for a method. They talk about calendars, meetings and the reactions of their teams. Each is a real squeeze and none is on its own the subject of the conversation. As the talk goes on, the question stops being what should I focus on and takes another form.

The question moves

Somewhere in the middle of the room a different sentence appears: whom am I prepared to disappoint. It is far more uncomfortable than the first, and that is why it can be answered. The first is looked for in a calendar, a matrix, a new tool. The second is found only in the executive herself. We saw something similar with direction: direction is not a document; it is written in what a company refuses. An executive's focus is read the same way, in what she declines rather than in what she says.

In the processes that go well one thing is shared: the executive takes the disappointment on early and openly, but not alone. When she weighs the cost there is someone across from her who does not expect a result from her. That may be an adviser, a partner, a former colleague or a coach; what counts is that she has somewhere to think aloud. Everything we write on clarity comes back to this: clarity is not the answer to a question but the ability to say the question aloud.

One thing about timing stays with us. The question rarely arrives in a crisis. More often it comes in a stretch when everything looks fine from outside but the executive no longer recognises her own day. From outside the work is moving. From inside she cannot say, at day's end, what she did. That uncertainty comes not from pressure but from not knowing whose pressure it is.

So we like to begin a first conversation with an inventory, not a plan: what happens in the day, and which of it is this seat's work. Once the inventory exists the conversation changes, because the executive has for the first time read her own day through another person's eyes.

The first step in focusing is not a ranking but a choice of whom to think in front of. How we work is built in that order: first whose list it is, then the seat's own work set apart, and the cost named last.