Gravity
#252 How to cultivate focus and execute better
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Focus is mission-critical but most companies don't lower the gravitational forces pulling on attention. As a result, large companies with too much mass have a hard time navigating and adapting to the quickly changing Organic Growth landscape:
Google's algorithm updates have struck hard and left casualties.
Even small rank changes in top positions have an outsized impact.
Consumer behavior on the internet is messy and hard to track
Teams are shrinking: 80,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2024 so far.1
Marketing budgets got slashed on average by -10-20% over the last two years and only slowly started to recover.2
Tech workers spend 2 out of 5 days per week on meetings and email.3 Only 43% of the time is spent on actual tasks.
No platform has as many changes of requirements. Over the last 3 years, Google launched 8 Core, 19 major and 75-150 minor updates. The company mentions thousands of improvements every year.
As individuals, we live in a distracted world where one of the most important skills is managing attention. How did we think teams are any different?
No win without focus
Sir Isaac Newton realized that the sun's gravity causes planets to orbit it in an elliptical path. Gravity in the workplace is a distraction from the focus of individuals and teams:
Meetings
Fire drills
Red tape
Strategy pivots
Too many goals
Alignment overhead
Too many cooks in the kitchen
Procurement and legal rabbit holes
Non-critical emails and Slack messages
The larger a company gets, the stronger its gravity. Taken to an extreme, it takes companies forever to launch even a single feature and they fall behind the competition. For individuals, gravity is even more consequential: scattered attention means getting nothing done, having no impact and likely being fired. Worse, people get exhausted and burned out in the process.
"Tranquility comes from doing less" (Ryan Holiday) but a lot of teams execute scatter-brained like a teenager multitasking between Netflix, TikTok and texting. Individual and team focus are connected at the hip. When a team is distracted it transfers to individuals. 2/3 of people struggle to find the energy to do their job.4
Whenever I get overwhelmed, my brain tells me to open my email inbox and look for a quick dopamine hit. But finding quick tasks and busy work is no achievement. Real impact comes from working through tedious, complex problems.
We cannot erase gravity but we can do 5 things better:
Communication
Prioritization
Strategy
Red Tape
Meetings
Better communication
Unclear communication is one of the biggest attention drainers. We waste a lot of time deciphering what other people mean. At Shopify, we had a very high bar for what internal coms went out to the Growth org and how it would be framed.
It's easy to @ your whole team on Slack but what people really need is key information:
What's going on?
How is it relevant to me?
What do I need to know/do?
Lazy communication has massive speed cost. In the book Smart Brevity, the authors provide a simple framework for writing clear statements:
Start with a muscular tease that grabs attention with 6 or fewer strong words
Explain what recipients need to know in the first sentence
Explain why it matters
Offer a choice to go deeper by providing more optional context
Most important: Think about one thing you want people to remember and not more. Nobody has time to read a Slack novel.
Better prioritization
At PayPal, Peter Thiel established a culture of hardcore focus. He would only discuss their #1 priority with managers and hold them accountable to just their one main contribution to the company.
Focus is a forcing function to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to what to spend time on. No one could be a better example of hardcore prioritization than engineers. If you want to get something on the ENG roadmap, something else has to give.
An effective roadmap operating system has only a few lines of code:
what's the goal?
what are the top 3 things that get us there?
for those 3 things, what do we need in terms of people, assets, time, support from other teams and tools?
for those 3 things, who does what by when?
defend yourself and your team as much as possible from anything else
You never look back at your time at a company and say "man, my 4th, 5th and 6th priority back then really hit home" but you might remember the impact of priorities 1, 2 and 3.
Cal Newport's new book, Slow Productivity, mentions doing less as one of the top ways to do better work. But the advice I like the most is doubling the time you think a project takes. Doubling automatically trims your roadmap by probably 50% but makes it more likely that you deliver on time and deliver well. A big part of moving ourselves into an overcommitment corner is underestimating how long projects take (I think I wrote the last sentence at least as much for myself as for you).
Better strategies
Poor strategies are hard to follow and confuse the team. In my experience, managers want to get fancy but miss the most important point: a good strategy means doing something different than the competition. Instead of outworking contenders, you want to do something that's unique and leans into your competitive advantage.
Pairing differentiation with prioritization, your 3 most important projects should underline how you achieve the same goal in a different way as your competitors. For example, instead of writing 100 blog articles, can you build a programmatic play or a list of tools? Or can you leverage contributors who write the content instead of a large in-house team?
I also found that most strategies simply aren't clear. A simple test for clarity is to up or downsize the surface you have to explain it: can you express your strategy in one paragraph (TL,DR), one page (high-level) and one doc (in-depth)?
Less Red Tape
Red Tape in the form of excessive bureaucracy kills execution. I've seen many companies that take many weeks and endless alignment meetings before being able to sign up for a simple SaaS tool. Procurement and legal teams can slow companies down and frustrate teams beyond means.
The key to having speed and a good evaluation process is clear guidelines when legal or procurement steps in. With one of my former clients, the fastest-growing fintech startup in history, we sat down with the legal team and got a full download on guardrails. What can we say and what not? When do we have to get legal approval and when can we move forward without it?
This is a task for the team manager or org leader. While tedious, the good news is that once the borders have been established, teams can move forward faster and focus on execution.
Fewer meetings
Tobi Lütke, founder and CEO of Shopify, called meetings a "bug". The leadership team regularly deployed the "Chaos Monkey", a script that deletes all recurring meetings with more than 2 participants. Other companies set guardrails around time. Calendly restricts meetings to noon until 5 PM.
Most meetings are poorly run, unnecessary or simply a way for people to socialize. Besides an agenda, every meeting should have a clear purpose. There really are only three types of meetings: socializing, information sharing, decision making.
Building relationships in the workplace is important, and there is nothing wrong with socializing. It's important to be explicit and avoid meeting to "talk about project x" while really wanting to socialize.
Information-sharing meetings are best done async. Instead of getting a large group of people together, record your message in a video or write a memo.
Decision-making meetings should be led by the decision maker and come with a pre-read. The problem with many large organizations is that decisions are poorly framed; it's unclear who makes the decision, and the decision-maker doesn't have explicit criteria for how to make the decision.
Outlook: Can AI help us regain focus?
Show me how focused your team is and I’ll show you a team that will win. High gravity in large organizations, on the other hand, is an ask to be disrupted by a smaller, more agile player. The good news is that technology is working against gravity, at least in the workplace.
AI has the potential to help us find fragmented information, force clarity, and take over bland admin tasks that drain time so we can focus on things that matter.
Microsoft's Future of Work report concludes, "Organizational knowledge is fragmented across documents, conversations, apps and devices, but LLMs hold the potential to gather and synthesize this information in ways that were previously impossible".5 In the future, we'll be able to ask LLMs questions about any internal process, like "what are our top goals?" or "does this need legal review?" The freed-up time allows us to refine our strategies and get work done.
That future still seems a few years away. Until then, we can do a lot to improve our attention.
Unusual but very pleasant Memo.
Since you mentioned Cal's new book: Did you finish it already? If so, what's your take?
Also, which books by Ryan Holiday did you read and like?
Finally: Did you finish Storyworthy? Lots of book questions haha.
I thought about focus and distractions a lot last year. Stolen Focus by Johann Hari is a great book on the topic. :)
Great post, I like the metaphor