I'm a follower of this priority aswell. I can't tame the onslaught, but I can ensure that my focus is spent in the right places.
I'd love to hear more about this topic as I often have issues communicating what I mean by that, as many other people in my environment want to see get things done "one after the other".
One thing I recently learned: Talking about "impact" rather than "importance" makes prioritization easier.
Why?
"Importance" pushes you to think about less tangible value judgements, including anxieties that your brain wants to escape from thinking about. "How important is it to write a clear Definition of Done for a junior engineer?" -- "ummm...kinda ...very? (I am a good manager...right?)"
"Impact" pushes you to think about more tangble events, including risks that your brain can concretely imagine their cost. "What is the impact when you write a clear Definition of Done for a junior engineer?" -- "It prevents them from misunderstanding the goal of a task so they're less likely to go down a rabbit hole. It enables them to execute more quickly by strengthening thier brain's 'you're doing the right thing, keep doing' motivation signal. It spends an opportunity to teach them how to identify a clear Definition of Done. It spends some of my time."
Because the cost/benefit of a task's impact is more imaginable, it is easier to decide to spend more resources to do it right or to cleanly abandon the task.
I had the pleasure of working with a brilliant owner of this media company, and what he did was this : he only gave me one task to focus on. Even if I asked if anything more was coming up I was told not to worry about it. He made sure everything worked out right, so truly a manager / leader in spirit.
The great thing was it created a peaceful atmosphere in the company. Focus is great, and fully agree with the article.
I remember Keith Rabois describing this to be key to Peter Thiels management philosophy at PayPal:
"So I am going to argue that you need to spend a lot of time focusing on people. This is something I learned from Peter Thiel actually. He used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing. And we all rebelled, every single person in the company rebelled to this idea. Because it's so unnatural, it's so different than other companies where people wanted to do multiple things, especially as you get more senior, you definitely want to do more things and you feel insulted to be asked to do just one thing." [1]
Interesting read! And this is exactly what I learned. On the other end of the spectrum I’ve worked at companies that gave me three jobs, and a manager constantly bugging me, switching goals, scope or priorities (often after a call with a client) . And while I could certainly do it, it wasn’t very pleasant and created a stressful environment.
My work was mostly webdev, some front-end and back-end. So I’d get a project to do, and a deadline where applicable. He also really didn’t care how I did it, as long as the work got done. At first there was somewhat more briefing, before he knew my skillset, but as he learned how I worked he just trusted me to do the job.
Structure was very flat : quite a few projects worked by one person, and small teams 2-4 depending on the size or scope. When there was a specific skill we didn’t have, that task would be outsourced.
In general I guess he was just very good at optimizating for outcome.
It's interesting to read the original post, your comment, and the responses to your comment. There are many different uses of the word "focus" and its relationship with saving time.
For me, focus is simply about depth over breadth.
If you want to do high quality work and enjoy it, you need to clear up your schedule to give a particular endeavor the time it deserves and then some. You do this by shrinking the scope of what you're working on down to something manageable, something you can do a stellar job on in the time allotted. That requires saying no to everything else, even things that are promising. You can get to those later.
If you want to do mediocre work, then take on huge projects with a ton of responsibilities, and try to work on them all simultaneously. Not only will the quality of your output suffer, but as an added bonus, you'll earn a packed calendar.
Think of your different pursuits and interests as games. Game of your relationship, of making great product or game of making money.
For each of those games you can think about what optimal move is right now. You may not know the truth but you can decide what you think it is.
Now the problem is that if these games are different, then inevitably, by definition you'll come to a point at which given move is great in your game A but sucks in your game B.
And that's The Game. I could write whole lot more about it because I've spend a long time thinking about it, but I think most HN readers can take it from there.
But that's how I see focus. You feel great when you focus on a single game. Then you don't have all those nasty conflicts (which are really the only problem you have in life - not a bad situation - a problem). It's rare though. There are games like social status etc. that you may not even know you're playing.
I would be interested to know more about this, because for me time isn’t the problem, it’s my lack of focus.
During my recent holiday, I took a different approach, and instead of telling myself to work on something from 9am to 12pm. I just woke up naturally and kinda did what I felt doing. Most days this was going to the gym in the morning, and then going to a coffee shop. I probably spend less time working on my project then I usually do, but I managed to complete so much more work, mostly because my time was extremely focussed and I wouldn’t drift off.
I find these videos to be what I experienced as typical Jordan Peterson ramblings. A clearly above average affluent, above average intelligence speaker, who goes off with what feels like very little preparation or direction. Does very little for me, specially when it comes to the specific topic of "taking time to think things through" that i was inquiring about (but also anything else, really).
I'm a follower of this priority aswell. I can't tame the onslaught, but I can ensure that my focus is spent in the right places.
I'd love to hear more about this topic as I often have issues communicating what I mean by that, as many other people in my environment want to see get things done "one after the other".