Deeper Focus & Priority Frameworks: You Can’t Multitask (Sorry)

Let's start with a hard truth from James Clear: the amount of multitasking you do is directly proportional to the decline in quality of your work. We tell ourselves we're crushing it when we juggle. We're not.

My standing example is watching my wife versus watching me on a typical morning. I'd head downstairs to take my meds, get distracted, decide I wanted water, get distracted, start unloading the dishwasher — and end up trying to swallow a pill, drink water, and empty the dishwasher simultaneously, stressed and anxious. She'd go one linear thing at a time. We'd finish at roughly the same moment, except she'd often beat me, calmly, while I'd manufactured a small panic attack. One thing at a time. Especially if you've got a little ADHD.

The better framing: if you can't text and drive — and you know you can't, no matter how capable you feel — then you probably can't do much of anything at once. I'm a huge victim of this myself.

Focus is elimination, not addition.

The best companies I've seen distill down to two or three strategic priorities. Not ten. I used to watch credit-union board sessions add a priority or two every year until we had eight or nine, none moving fast, all generating meetings. Less is more. And here's the practical secret: it's far easier to get a team to agree on the bottom two or three to cut than to agree on the top two or three to keep. Sometimes the path to focus runs through elimination.

Find your productivity pattern.

Think back to a time in the last few months when you got a ton done. Now reverse-engineer it. What time of day was it? Where were you — office with the door shut, a plane, a coffee shop, the golf course (looking at you, Chris)? What did you do right before? Had you just left a meeting, taken a walk, come back from lunch? When had you last eaten? (There's a famous study of Israeli parole judges: you were far more likely to get parole first thing in the morning than right before lunch. We make our key decisions at biological high and low points whether we admit it or not. My team will tell you: if I haven't eaten, stay away.)

Write down eight or ten of these productive moments and the patterns jump out — music, movement, a walk, a closed door, the hour before lunch. Then deliberately recreate those triggers. (You can't eat your way to productivity, sadly. But Misty and Chris and I take walk-and-talks to reset during long strategy days, and it works every single time.)

When you keep making the same micro-decision, build the procedure.

If you got interrupted for the same call 14 times this month, it's probably not a key decision — it just feels like one because you never explained your algorithm. Write out how you make it. The more of your couple-thousand daily micro-decisions you can pre-make, delegate, or systematize, the more room you have for deep work. Can't easily explain it? Record a Loom of yourself doing the task — ums, backtracks, and all — then distill it into a procedure (ChatGPT does this now) or just send the video to whoever's taking it over.

Paint the Vivid Vision.

This one's from Cameron Herold. As leaders we assume we make better calls than our teams — but usually we just know where we're going and forgot to tell them. Write the vision out in excruciating detail, two or three pages, and share it. When everyone's genuinely on the same page, they start delivering things in your direction like magic. Whenever I'm frustrated a team isn't adopting something fast enough, the fix is almost always: go write a better Vivid Vision.

Two prioritization tools.

First, the classic 4D / Eisenhower matrix: for each task, decide — Do it now, Delegate it, Delete it, or Decide later. Then immediately calendar the ones that survive. Key nuance: keep some cycles on the important-but-not-urgent quadrant. Skip it and everything eventually rots into urgent-and-important, which is exactly where your anxiety lives. Even 1–5% of your time spent there keeps you out of permanent firefight mode.

Second — my newer favorite — the 1-vs-1 method. Got a list of 20 things and can't rank them? Compare them head-to-head. Is "yell at Warren" more important than "yell at Jasper"? Check. Warren vs. Violet? Check. Warren vs. respond to Kimberly's text? Kimberly wins. Run every pair, tally the checkmarks, and in 10–15 minutes a hopelessly tangled list sorts itself. The shocker is always the same: three or four items get zero votes. You swore everything was important. Turns out, relative to each other, several things just... aren't. Those are the ones you delegate, delay, or kill.

Make the list, run it 1-vs-1, calendar the winners. Clarity, on demand.

Disruption with a side of humor —
Kirk Drake