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ESSENTIALS FOR LEADERS AND THOSE THEY LEAD

Leaders are expected to be productive. And by the yardstick of conventional time management, they are: they attend meetings, check off lists, multitask on projects, and manage deadlines. Why, then, isn’t anything getting done? Pointless interactions, information overload, and distractions leave executives too drained for much else, according to this McKinsey article. “Every minute spent on a low-value interaction eats into time that could be used for important, creative, and powerful activities,” say the article’s authors. The solution may lie in managing your attention, not your time. Here are some ways to do so—and perhaps increase your efficiency and task enjoyment as a result.

AN IDEA

Choose what to ignore

Since there will never be enough time to “do it all,” deciding what not to do may well be the most strategic time management decision. A simple rule of thumb for leaders is to identify a maximum of five things to focus on for the year and spend 95 percent of your time doing those things. McKinsey’s Frankki Bevins and Aaron De Smet suggest that organizations can help by establishing time limits for projects, reducing the number of decision makers involved, and ensuring that leaders dedicate most of their time to the organization’s priorities. Being productive is about timing, not time, says organizational psychologist Adam Grant in the New York Times: “So if you’re trying to power through a boring task, do it after a moderately interesting one, and save your most exciting task as a reward for afterward.”

A BIG NUMBER

28%

That’s the percentage of time lost every year by knowledge workers because of distractions, for an estimated loss of 581 hours per person. Both remote and in-office workers find it hard to focus on any given piece of work for very long—little more than half of respondents to a survey of 600 knowledge workers devote more than an hour to a task in an average day. Email is the top distraction for all workers; interruptions from colleagues and background noise such as ringing phones are the worst offenders in the office, whereas at home, the temptation to relax, finish up household chores, or tend to family obligations top the list. Even a three-second interruption can double the error rate for tasks—primarily because of workers’ shift in attention from task to task.

A QUOTE

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

That’s the wizard Gandalf in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring advising his hobbit friend Frodo before his epic adventure begins. A quest to manage time in the workplace may not be as arduous, but it can seem that way. In this hypothetical day in the life of a middle manager, the central character spends six hours on email and social media; three hours switching between TV, smartphone, and computer; and, deeply tired, falls asleep after having checked his phone a total of 150 times that day. Learning how to distribute cognitive work across three “gears”—low, medium, and high—could help this manager a great deal. He spends most of his day in medium gear, focusing on quick tasks and switching his attention constantly. If he spent more time in high gear, he could focus on demanding tasks for longer periods, bringing more mental energy to the task at hand.

A SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEW

“One thing we often notice these days is people feeling bad about themselves for the inability to focus,” says former policy maker Justin Zorn in this conversation with McKinsey senior partner Kunal Modi. Zorn—coauthor with consultant Leigh Marz of the book Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise—believes that “moments of pristine attention,” when we’re not distracted by the noise of the world, can boost physical health and mental concentration. Silence doesn’t have to be auditory: people can find inner quiet even while dancing to loud music or carving wood with a chainsaw, for example. “We’re looking at silence as a starting place to discern the signal from the noise,” says Marz. “It is a place for us to take stock of what is true and needing our attention—a signal—and what is noise—a distraction—distracting us from what we want to put our attention to.”

CHILL

You don’t need to create elaborate systems to stay focused—sometimes, a simple productivity hack or two can energize you for the day ahead. One executive makes a ritual of checking email just twice a day, giving it full attention for 45 minutes at a time. Another dedicates the first hour of every day to the most important challenge of the day. Still not convinced? Consider these tips from celebrities: make your bed neatly, drink room temperature water, make any crucial decisions at the same time each day, and take freezing-cold showers to be “fresh as a daisy, all the time.”

Lead attentively.

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