The Art of Focus

Why the most important work never gets done.

This article is part of The Art of Leadership series, where I cover twelve principles of leadership that my research found underpin superior company performance. Read the full series here.

Jeff Bezos has described his working day as an exercise in restraint. He gets eight hours of sleep, schedules nothing demanding before ten in the morning, and considers his day finished by late afternoon. The reasoning he offers is this: a senior executive, he has said, is paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions.

Set that standard against the evidence on how senior leaders actually spend their time.

When Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria tracked 27 chief executives around the clock for 13 weeks, they assembled some 60,000 hours of data on where executive time goes. Roughly 72% of it was spent in meetings. Only 28% was spent working alone, and much of that was fragmented into blocks of an hour or less. The activity that most determines whether a company has a future, sustained thinking about its direction, received the smallest and most interrupted share.

A Bain study published in Harvard Business Review a decade earlier had reached a similar conclusion by a different route. Senior teams, it found, met to discuss strategy for only about three hours a month, and as much as 80% of top management’s time was devoted to issues that accounted for less than 20% of a company’s long-term value.

The two findings describe the same phenomenon from opposite ends. Bezos frames the executive’s job as a handful of decisions that truly matter. The research suggests that in most organisations those decisions are precisely the ones that never receive sustained attention, because something else has consumed the day. That something is almost always operational: the firefighting that feels like the substance of leadership, resembles it closely, and displaces the work that only the most senior person can do.

The problem is not that leaders are careless or poorly organised. It is that urgent work is, in fact, urgent. What appears to be a failure of discipline is better understood as a structural mismatch between the work that drives attention and the work that deserves it.

The structural advantage of the urgent

Most leaders can articulate the difference between the urgent and the important. The distinction rarely changes behaviour, because the urgent enjoys three structural advantages that the important cannot match.

The first is specificity. An escalating customer, weekly sales getting off track, a key person who is unhappy: each of these has definite edges. It can be seen, grasped, and resolved, and its resolution delivers a small, clean sense of completion. Important questions, such as where a business should stand in five years, have no edges and offer no comparable moment of closure.

The second is that the urgent is often personal. Someone is waiting on the resolution and watching to see whether the leader responds. Nobody, by contrast, waits in the doorway to ask whether the competitive landscape has been thought through lately. Strategic work has no one chasing it, which is a large part of why it slips.

The third is that the urgent signals effort. Resolving a live problem in front of the organisation both feels like leadership and looks like it. Sitting alone in thought looks like little at all. In a culture that rewards visible activity, a leader who reserves a morning to think can feel faintly derelict, and may be perceived that way by others.

Taken together, these advantages make the outcome close to inevitable. The important work loses out day after day because it never wins a direct contest against something concrete, human, and immediate. Executive attention, in this reading, is the scarcest resource an organisation possesses and the one it guards least carefully. Few leaders would allow an unbudgeted claim on their capital. Many allow almost any claim on their afternoon.

A test for what deserves attention

One question separates the work that genuinely requires a particular leader from the work that has merely arrived at their desk: if this were not handled personally, would the outcome be meaningfully worse?

Applied honestly, the question disqualifies much of a typical executive day. The routine status meeting proceeds without its most senior attendee. The approval that functions as a rubber stamp could be done by someone else. The problem being escalated frequently arrives with several people already capable of resolving it, who have learned that escalation is easier than decision.

A smaller set of activities passes the test. Setting direction is one. The two or three relationships that cannot be delegated are another. So is the decision that properly belongs to the leader, and the signal that leaders send, whether they intend to or not, through the choice of what they attend to. These deteriorate materially when the most senior person steps away, and it is for these that executive attention exists.

The instructive point is that the two lists are of very different sizes. The work that passes the test might occupy a single focused morning. The work that fails it will expand to fill every hour it is permitted to fill.

How attention is protected

Identifying the important work is rarely the difficulty. Protecting time for it, against an organisation that will fill any gap left open, is where the discipline lies. Several practices distinguish the leaders who manage it.

They tend to reserve time for strategic work before other commitments accumulate, rather than hoping to find it once the calendar fills. A block placed in an otherwise empty week survives; the same block, inserted into a crowded one, is displaced the first time something urgent appears. The distinction matters more than it seems, because it determines whether the important work is scheduled at all.

They also build routes for urgent work to travel somewhere other than to them. Much of what reaches a senior leader arrives there because no one below has been given a path to resolve it. Each time such a matter is handled personally, the organisation learns to bring the next one, and the flow increases rather than abating. Establishing the route once and holding to it even when personal intervention would be quicker is what interrupts the pattern.

The most effective leaders match their hardest thinking to the hours at which they think best rather than to whatever gap the calendar offers. Bezos reserves his best hours for consequential decisions and declines to make important ones late in the day. The underlying principle generalises: strategic questions, given the tired end of the afternoon, tend to receive second-rate answers.

Finally, they judge a week by what was protected rather than by what was cleared. An empty inbox is not evidence of a well-spent week; often it is evidence that the week was spent on other people’s priorities. Porter and Nohria recommend that executives review, each quarter, whether their use of time in fact matched their stated priorities. Most who conduct the exercise are unsettled by the result.

What the argument is not

None of this amounts to a case for withdrawal, for closing the door on the business in order to contemplate its future undisturbed. The urgent work is real, and a good deal of it is important in its own right. Customers do escalate, figures do move, people do require answers. The claim is narrower: that most of this work does not require the particular individual it reaches, and that treating tasks any capable person could handle as though they demand the organisation’s most senior figure is a failure of focus that presents itself, persuasively, as diligence.

The relevant test is therefore not whether a task is important. Almost everything is important to someone. The test is whether it represents the most valuable use of the one form of attention the organisation cannot replace. Firefighting is both important and endlessly abundant. The work of setting direction is important and available from only one source.

Some fires do require the chief executive, and part of the skill lies in recognising which. But a leader who personally fights every fire has not demonstrated commitment so much as revealed that no organisation was ever built capable of fighting its own, which is itself a consequence of the strategic work left undone.

Implications

The exercise that most sharpens the argument is a retrospective one: an honest account of where last week’s hours actually went, as distinct from where they were intended to go. How many were spent on work that would have turned out much the same in the leader’s absence, and how many on the small number of things that only that leader could have done.

For most executives the ratio is uncomfortable, and the discomfort is the useful part. Bezos organised an entire working day around the protection of a few consequential decisions. The evidence suggests that most leaders protect almost nothing of comparable value, and then find themselves wondering why the strategic work never advances. It does not advance because the time it required was never defended.