3 Habits for Bringing More Focus Into 2024

The first few weeks of a new year bring a predictable pattern: We look back on past goals and set our sights on fresh, new ambitions. But while plans are projected in months, we know the true progress happens by the week, day and hour —?where all the distraction traps are laid and it’s easier to lose your way.

With competing priorities (amidst pesky Slack pings, emails and back-to-back meetings) clamoring for our time, finding focus becomes all the more vital. How do we tune out the noise? What do we put first on our mountainous to-do list?

Time management isn’t about packing the most things into the minutes of your day — counterintuitively, less is more. True productivity means scheduling less, saying no more often, and resisting distraction when you can. The most productive people aren’t the ones who are juggling the most commitments. They’re the ones operating the most intentionally.

Over the years on the Review, we’ve gathered practical advice from busy CEOs, executive coaches and seasoned operators on the exact tactics they use to manage their time effectively. As you look ahead to ambitious annual plans, we hope these tips and habits can bring more clarity to the months ahead.

Engineer your schedule according to your energy

Katia Verresen 's coaching clients often come to her with a lofty task: find more hours in their packed calendars. But first, she asks these folks to take stock of their physical reserves.

Here’s how: Use a spreadsheet to plot how alert you feel versus how tired you feel on an hourly basis. Verresen recommends doing this for a stretch of three days to a week — enough time to see a pattern emerge. “When you track things this closely, it becomes a movie you can replay. And when we look at the movie together, we can identify blocks of time where they are clearly more alert on a regular basis, and times when they are not,” she says.

This exercise extends beyond figuring out if you’re “a morning person,” Verresen says. It’s knowing what hours of the day you are capable of higher-level thought. When can you tackle the gnarliest problems? When are you able to invest energy in tasks that aren’t easy or don’t have known solutions?

Once armed with a better understanding of the peaks and valleys of your daily energy, make adjustments to how you spend your time with?calendar blocking. Identify the chunks of time on your calendar when you have the most physical energy for work, and plug in easy or lower-intensity tasks (like catching up on emails) for the hours where you have less energy.

Observe your distraction triggers so that you can get ahead of them.

According to Nir Eyal , behavioral scientist and bestselling author of “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products ,” before you can beat distraction, you need to understand where it’s coming from.

“All human behavior — distraction included — starts from an internal trigger. If you feel cold, you put on a jacket. If you feel warm, you take it off,” says Eyal. And with products we use, it’s no different. You might check the news out of boredom, Facebook out of loneliness, Google out of uncertainty. “These instantaneous responses are what makes these products so habit-forming,” he says. “Even after you remove all these distractions, if you don't hone in on internal triggers, you're always going to get diverted by something.”

Here are a few simple ways that Eyal recommends we meet internal triggers head-on in order to get the upper hand on distraction:

• Note the sensation.?Eyal recommends noting when you are distracted, and then looking for the emotion that triggered it. “Maybe it’s, ‘Hey, you know what? I was working on this task. I got bored, and I got up from my chair and I went to talk to Steve across the hall,’” says Eyal. “By simply noting the reason, we can start to pinpoint the sensation and unpack the negative feeling.”
• Crowd out with curiosity.?Be inquisitive — versus judgmental — about your internal triggers. “What was the emotion that you were trying to escape? Was it boredom? Was it loneliness? Was it uncertainty? Was it fear that you couldn't do the task? Only when we home in on that underlying emotion can we start finding a different way to deal with that emotion than reflexively trying to escape from it altogether,” says Eyal.

Try organizing around two-week sprint themes

As an early startup employee, you have to ruthlessly prioritize in order to keep up with the demands of a fast-scaling company. But it’s also key to stay nimble and agile, as plans can change on a dime and you find yourself wearing many hats.

That’s why Stacy La (former Director of Design at Clover Health) suggests bracketing your time in two-week sprints. “Two-week themes are flexible enough that I could swap them modularly as business needs changed, if needed — and compact enough that I was too busy to waste time thinking of opportunity cost once I decided to embark on one,” says La.

Here’s an example: “When vetting design agencies, I limited my planning, research, meetings, evaluation and decisions to a two-week span.?Prioritizing biweekly themes creates enough momentum to create real value in a particular area of the business, but not so much as to cause a terrible setback if the intended results aren’t achieved.”

Read the full article for more tips for honing focus.