The Single-Thread Model

Welcome to Early Hints.

A newsletter to help busy business leaders to stay on top of new developments.

This edition: Learning from Amazon - on Single Threaded Ownership. TL;DR:

• The workplace today kills 40% of your productivity
• In the attention economy, focus is an unfair advantage
• Being single-threaded gives you focus & there is a blueprint to it
• AI features in office tools can help you get there

Keep reading for tips, articles, and tools on the above.

These aren't trends but deep dives. Getting early signals onto your radar.

Over the past 20 years, people kept telling me that I was a “truffle pig.” My superpower is to sniff out new technologies, products, and approaches that are relevant to you. Every week, I am covering a new topic.

You already know multi-tasking is harmful. So what’s the problem?

The framing is wrong. We think of attention and focus at the micro level of tasks. But the problem is much bigger. Look at your role's entire scope, all the responsibilities, efforts, and activities. It isn’t just that you are juggling things in your day-to-day tasks; the overall model of your work may be wrong.

In this edition, I am talking about an alternative model that I encountered at Amazon: being single-threaded. Following this model will add 40% to your productivity.

The man chasing two rabbits catches neither. - Confucius

Focus as an Unfair Advantage in the Attention Economy

Attention is already a scarce resource and is becoming even more so. You want the leader of an effort to pay undivided attention to what they are doing. Focusing is a wilful act which is disrupted if “too much is going on”.

For over ten years, it has been known and repeatedly confirmed that multitasking does not work. It kills 40% of your productivity. This is true at the level of daily tasks but also at juggling multiple projects in parallel. The research on this is unanimous, which is rare in social sciences.

Owning multiple projects simultaneously forces people to switch contexts frequently, increasing the number of interruptions in a day. On average, people are interrupted 10-20 times per day, with people switching tasks every 10-15 minutes. You don’t really have a work day. You have short bursts of work on a multitude of things spread throughout a fragmented schedule. To put it bluntly:

This is crazy.

But it is also the norm. You are not alone in feeling busy yet unproductive. It’s not a feeling; it is a fact.

There are many micro-hacks to alleviate this, from turning off notifications to establishing deep work routines. Yet, as long as the attention is divided at a macro level due to a multitude of projects, there will be context switching and increased interruptions.

There are many symptoms of context switching. You see too much work in progress, highly fragmented schedules, frequent firefighting, disconnected and slow workflows, and information overload.

Many of the tools we use on a daily basis are designed to engage and catch our attention. Much research was done on the addictive design of modern applications. It is intentional. Notifications prompt task-irrelevant thoughts and decrease focus by ~20%, consistent throughout the day. Basically, you lose an entire day of the week with distractions. You can see for yourself by keeping a distraction journal for a week. What you will find is this:

Add to it bad workplace design: People always feel pressured to be available and responsive. Conversations happen quickly and without warning. In poorly established remote settings, FOMO drives further attention to notifications. These interruptions have a high cost. It takes anywhere between 10-15 minutes to resume work after an interruption. This is from a study on programmers but applies to all knowledge workers, as research on Flow shows. Once work is resumed, it takes an average of 23 minutes to get back into the flow. Your working memory is also reduced persistently.

There is a way out of this.

Creating Single-Minded Focus

Knowing that attention and focus are increasingly rare, excelling in them can create a distinct advantage for you in your career. In the age of leverage, focusing on the right thing will accelerate your success more than anything else. While everyone else is trying to pay attention to everything, you cut through the noise.

So, how do you create a single-minded focus?

First, realize that if you are earning your living with your mind, you need to treat it well. An athlete aspiring for the Olympics will not go far if they smoke, eat junk, or overtax their body. Make no mistake, you are a mental and social athlete in the modern workplace.

Practice mental hygiene and make sure to have a healthy workplace. The former is entirely under your control. The latter can be influenced. In the worst case, you quit and find a new job. Just like an athlete should not stay with an abusive coach and bad training environment, you should not stick around in a toxic workplace.

Putting these basics in place is a constant process. There is always something you can tweak at the micro level. But assuming you are working on the above, here is how to create focus.

Have a priority.

Most people prioritize by creating a ranked list of things, considering their projects' importance, impact, and urgency.

What I am suggesting - and what single-threaded owners at Amazon do - is to eliminate the idea of having projects and instead have a single priority. With only one thing to focus on, having a single-minded approach to work becomes easy. With only a single target, there is little context switching, reduced interruptions, and no need for hacks.

I am not advocating for killing an effort, putting it off, or pushing back against it. If you are building a business or are a founder working on a product, you need to do a myriad of things. Removing one piece might crumble the entire house of cards. What I am suggesting is something else.

Defragment your schedule by having long bursts of focus. But don’t just do this at the micro-level of tasks, as Cal Newport writes in Deep Work. Instead, immerse yourself deeply in one goal for an extended time while cueing the rest. Deep immersion raises the likelihood of getting into a state of flow. It compounds over time, making it easier to focus over time. You’ll find a blueprint to follow below.

Being Single-Threaded

You need a singular mind. I experienced this firsthand at Amazon. For strategic efforts, new products, and other highly important activities, a “single-threaded” leader (STL) is designated. They are tasked with putting all their focus and attention towards a single goal. When they get up every morning and go to bed every evening, they only think about how to achieve their goal.

Compare this to an executive with anywhere between 6 to 10 projects at their desk at a time. In IT, missing focus is the number one reason for project failure. Over 70% of middle managers and PMs juggle 5-6 projects on average.

An STL at Amazon has exactly one.

Think about it this way:

Imagine a friend approaches you with a business idea. He knows exactly who the customer is and what their problem is. He validated the business opportunity. He has a good idea of what the solution could be. He just needs a few thousand as an investment from you to make it work. He is taking a few months off to focus on this.

Would you invest in that person?

If the data is solid, the proposal makes sense, and I can afford it, I probably would.

Now imagine another friend, the same scenario with a little twist:

He still needs to keep his day job, but he is reducing his hours and will be working on this on the side. He also has a few other irons in the fire. Just in case this one doesn’t work out. He is also podcasting and writing a newsletter to make sure he has an audience once the thing is built.

Would you invest in that person?

I sure as hell wouldn’t.

“The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job.” - David Limp, SVP Amazon

Yet, this is exactly what we do in most companies. We give a person 5-6 different things to do. Then, we assign each of these things to a group of people who also work on concurrent projects. We throw a barrage of notifications, emails, and meeting requests at them to make it more challenging. As a cherry on top, we communicate a fuzzy strategy where everything is a priority.

This is 80-90% of workplaces today, so it should sound familiar to you.

To be fair, it isn’t all peaches and roses at Amazon, either. Even an STL will have activities they volunteered for, events and talks to prepare, and corporate BS to deal with. Any company of sufficient size incurs costs through collaboration and politics. It is inevitable.

Those put aside, most efforts are multi-faceted and complex. Even focusing just on one product, with a clearly dedicated product team that is not allocated to anything else, has its challenges. You deal with customer and market research, development and production issues, legal and compliance topics, team dynamics, etc.

Yet, at least you follow a single thread instead of scratching at a yarnball.

Luckily, there is a path to becoming single-threaded.

The Blueprint

Within Amazon, there is a distinction between being a single-threaded owner (STO) and a single-threaded leader (STL). The former directly manages all resources required to execute, makes all decisions about the execution, and fully controls the pace and scope of the roadmap. An STL is responsible for all decisions, but doesn’t directly manage or decide on execution. They need to influence and align with others.

There is a blueprint to establishing an STO inside a company and a blueprint to establishing yourself as the STL, even if you do not have full control over your role. Here are the two blueprints to follow:

Single-Threaded Ownership

1. The STO has no other responsibilities and no other initiatives. They are fully dedicated to the success of the team and its goals.
2. The team is also single-threaded. They are separable, and autonomous with little / no dependencies on other teams. They make all decisions on execution without requiring coordination or approvals.
3. The team must have a well-defined purpose and goal. For example, the Inventory Picker team at Amazon aims to enable the collection of the right product for the right customer at the right time. Their goal was to do that as fast as physically possible, to reduce the time from click to the product leaving the warehouse.
4. The team has a clear composition, charter, and set of business metrics against the goal. Everyone must understand their roles and responsibilities and the success metrics for their evaluation.
5. The boundaries of ownership are clear. The STO and their team understand what they own and control, and which areas are owned by others.

Here are the most common objections you will get in introducing this model:

• Objection: We can’t just focus all resources on one effort. Answer: 95% of new products fail, and 65% of projects fail. The no 1 reason? Lack of focus.
• O: What about the projects that we pull these people from? A: They are killed or postponed. We need to prioritize ruthlessly or risk being mediocre.
• O: How do we ensure that these people aren’t pulled into other activities again? A: We position them as a special task force and encapsulate them from other efforts.
• O: How do we give them autonomy? Won’t they just do what they want? A: We establish clear business goals and metrics. How they achieve those is up to them.
• O: How do we reduce dependencies? All our efforts are highly linked! A: We define clear inputs and outputs into their zone of ownership, then ignore the rest.

You will find many variations of the five patterns above, with individuals outside the team unwilling to cede control, resources, or recognition. The STO and their team will have their challenges, too. Most of us are not used to working this way or are unwilling to let go of other activities. You need to ensure that people make a clean cut with all the other efforts they were involved with.

Single-Threaded Leadership

Like the STO, the STL has no other initiatives at a given time. If you have multiple projects and responsibilities, you need to work on them in a serial sequence, not in parallel. Depending on the nature of your work, you could dedicate a week or a month to one effort, then switch.

This will cause complaints from those who are being ignored in the time, but you can make up for it with increased quality and quantity. You will get more done in a single week of intense focus than in weeks of distributed attention and interruptions.

1. Communicate the STL concept and your intent. Schedule your efforts. You could start off with a focus day, then expand it to a week, then a month.
2. Create a well-defined purpose and goal for the effort, not the team. The team members will not be dedicated, so to them, it is just another project. But it will be different from the others in that there is more clarity around what they want to achieve.
3. The teams will not be single-threaded - little autonomy and lots of dependencies. Frontload all coordination and approvals to allocate as much time to the effort as possible. A good way to do this is to schedule a “sprint day” or week, announcing it as a workshop. Be clear on decisions needed, and book ahead of time with stakeholders.
4. For the blocked time, make sure you have the team composition you need. Any external expertise needs to be available. Brief everyone on the workshop's goal, roles, and responsibilities.
5. The ownership boundaries will be loose, so you need shorter work sessions with stakeholders and other teams to align with them and influence them toward your effort.
6. Document everything so you can prove with anecdotes and data that a single-threaded model has a greater impact than business as usual. A good and cheap way to document is to get an intern to follow you and the team throughout the process, making a documentary using video clips, photos, screenshots, and text. Think of this like a “making-of” of a movie.

Practically speaking, being single-threaded gives authority to say no. It allows people to focus on a context, make and veto decisions, take bold action, and ignore interruptions and distractions by other parts of the organization. It lets them leverage the resources and capabilities they need when they need them and use them as they see fit.

There are early hints that this model will spread across all organizations.

Here is why.

Leveraging New Tools

If you use project management software, such as Jira, Trello, or Monday, you might have noticed a new layer of functionality driven by generative AI.

For instance, the Butler Upgrade of Trello automates workflows like adding a new team member to a project. Previously, you had to create this automation as a workflow. Now, the genAI feature of Butler simply suggests this automatically. In the future, Butler will simply act and prepare the onboarding of the new team member as you talk about it on your Slack or Teams channel.

Ayanza, ClickUp, and Notion are able to generate descriptions based on the context of what you are writing. Based on your purpose and goal for your initiative, Notion can generate and suggest KPI for your team and create a dashboard. ClickUp predicts progression based on project data and can signal impediments early on. Ayanza can forecast the capacity needs of a project based on team allocation.

Mind you, these are features available today.

Think a few years later when project management and collaboration tools will be able to act as agents on manual and repetitive tasks, such as quality control in project proposals.

You might think that this convenience would drive people to have more concurrent projects.

I think the opposite will be the case.

Look at a typical set of tools used at work: Teams, Office 365, Trello, and Miro. All of these basics already have AI features embedded. These features are only possible through large datasets across projects and customers. Right now, they enable the automation of processes and the generation of content.

Do both of these long enough, and the tool will be able to detect whether you are working on project A or project B. Instead of manually filtering messages, notifications, and activities, the tools will do it for you.

Going back to what I said at the beginning, attention is a scarce resource.

People are already getting fed up by social media noise and the barrage of communication. It is mentally exhausting to manage this information overload. You will want the tool that you are using to know what you are using it on, then block out everything else so you can focus on it.

This essentially creates single-threaded behavior.

There is already a “focus mode” on mobile devices. Right now, they just block based on whatever you set manually. In the future, the devices will recognize when you are trying to focus and what you are focusing on. Then, they will support you in that.

Unless, of course, you are sitting in a busy office where anyone can tap you on the shoulder at any time.

Like this edition? Share it with others. Want more insights? Ask me for links, studies, and resources on the topic of this edition.