Free to Focus summary

When our calendar starts to overflow and our to-do lists become longer than shopping lists, we instinctively cut down on recreation and relaxation. For most of us, busy periods mean canceling dinner with a friend or getting a few less hours of sleep. But not only does skimping on rest and leisure damage our emotional health, it’s also completely ineffective.

Many of us believe that time is flexible and our energy levels remain unchanged throughout the day – we think we can extend our workday by 20 percent and accomplish 20 percent more. But time is fixed, and energy levels are finite. We usually get our best work done in the morning, when our minds are fresh, while after lunch we’re slower and less productive. This is daily proof that energy levels are flexible, and focus and willpower are finite resources that must be replenished.

Clearly, productivity should give you more time for rejuvenation, making you more focused and efficient – but how can you achieve this? The first step involves acting like a gardener.

To save time, you need to prune away the nonessential tasks in your workday. Doing less to be more productive may seem strange, but it’s the most important secret to efficiency. Productivity isn’t about doing more of everything – it’s about doing more of the right things. This means identifying key tasks to focus on and trimming away everything else.

Today, it’s easy to be overworked and overcommitted – the hard part is having the discipline to prioritize. How is it that some people manage to accomplish so much more than others in the same amount of time? One reason is that highly productive people understand the power of no.

Productivity superstars can say no, both to unnecessary tasks, as we saw in the last blink, and to requests from their colleagues and clients. They know that if they allowed them to, these tasks and requests could take up all their time and energy and prevent them from focusing on truly important work.

How many of us walk into the office with no plan in place, passively reacting to the day’s developments? But this behavior is setting us up to fail. The author Robin Sharma once wrote, “you will never be able to hit a target that you cannot see.” This makes a lot of sense – what’s the point of being productive if our actions are unstructured and we’re not aiming for anything specific? For productivity to have meaning and for focus to have an outlet, we need direction.

Therefore, it’s essential that we plan our day beforehand. This clearly sets our target and gives us something to aim for. We can do this by planning our day around a big three – three tasks that we must accomplish that day. These are our priorities, and anything else achieved is a bonus. Three might seem like a small number, but we can choose complex tasks. The advantage of this system is that it forces us to prioritize our objectives.

Instant messaging, push notifications, web surfing and the endless scroll of social media – these things are embedded into our daily lives, and all conspire to rob us of our focus and concentration. And while many of them have brought considerable benefits to our personal and professional lives, they’ve also made it easier than ever to procrastinate.

In fact, we can view the instant gratification culture that technology has fostered as a new type of economy – the distraction economy. Things like phone calls, emails, social media and news sites are all competing for our attention, and this is a valuable commodity – that’s why we call it paying attention!