How to Help Employees Focus on What Actually Matters

When a manager tells me their people can't prioritize, they usually want a better list. A clearer ranking. Someone to finally tell the team what matters most.

I understand the wish. But a better list rarely changes much on its own. Before I touch the list, I want to see where people's hours actually go.

So when I help a team focus, I look at three things. Where the hours actually go. What rules people follow while they work. And what was true in the moments when each person was at their most focused.

Busy is not the same as focused

For long periods of my life I worked 16 or 17 hours a day. If you had asked me why, I would have said something noble. I wanted to do important things.

For years I didn't understand what was actually driving it. Being busy was protecting me. As long as I was always busy, I never had to feel unimportant. The long days weren't a sign of focus. They were a way to avoid a feeling.

There was another stretch when I worked nonstop, ran out to grab food and ate on my way back to the desk. Then I heard a speaker I admire say that he goes swimming every morning, because the healthier he is, the better his business does. It sounded absurd to me. It also turned out to be true. When I looked honestly, a big part of my work wasn't serving my vision nearly as much as taking care of my own body and energy would.

That is the first thing I want managers to take in. An employee who is always busy isn't necessarily a focused one. The question isn't "Are they working hard?" It's closer to this: is what they're doing right now the best use of their time and energy for what we're trying to build?

Where the hours actually go

There is a simple model I learned from Tony Robbins that I still use. Everything we do falls into one of four boxes, depending on whether it is important and whether it is urgent.

Robbins says people are at their best, living at their highest level, when they're in the box of things that are important but not urgent. The flow research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi supports this to some degree.

My target is for most of the working week to go there. Half at least. Sixty, seventy, even eighty percent is possible.

I don't expect it to be a hundred. We all want a bit of time that is neither important nor urgent, just to switch off. And we want some urgent and important work too, because it makes us feel needed. It feeds the ego, and that has some value. The trouble starts when that feeling runs the whole calendar.

One clarification people always ask about. "Important" doesn't have to mean important to the company or to anyone outside. It can be important to you. For me, going to train is important. The things you love count.

Robbins frames all of this as proactivity. You start the action instead of reacting to whatever is happening around you.

Here's the part that sounds wrong at first. If you want your people to achieve more, they usually need to do less. Not more. They need to pay more attention to the things they're actually responsible for. A practical start: have each person write down their areas of responsibility, then group their tasks under them. You can go from the tasks up or from the areas down. And remember that seizing one opportunity often means saying no to a lot of others.

And be realistic about capacity. What you invest in grows. What you don't invest in slides. Most people can truly focus on one area at a time, and the most capable ones manage two. A big new project needs intense focus in its early stages, and the price is attention taken away from everything else. Plan for that price.

Clear rules for how the work gets done

Csikszentmihalyi, in his book Flow, describes something I keep coming back to. When people give themselves clear rules for how they do their job, boring and repetitive or advanced and complex, they enjoy it more. They are also far more likely to build real skill and move up. One of his examples stayed with me: office clerks who imagined that every key they pressed made a sound, and turned their typing into music.

Rules do something a priority list can't. When a person is unsure what to do next, the rules decide for them. I suggest going back to them every few months to check that they still fit. Usually you'll sharpen one. Once in a while you'll add or drop one.

I learned the cost of ignoring this the hard way. During one hard period, the work itself was worth doing. What I got wrong was the way. I broke my own rules about how I wanted to get there. Insecurity took over, and it pulled me down. The lesson I took: the path matters as much as the destination.

What do work rules look like in practice? A few I've taught or given in coaching:

• Email once or twice a day, not all day. People who go in and out of the inbox keep moving their focus somewhere else. Even someone whose job is heavy on email can often go from checking it constantly to twice a day.
• Batch similar work. A participant asked whether to spread sales calls across the week. My answer: group them together, so you aren't handling them daily.
• Every follow-up gets a date and a time in the calendar, with an alarm set for exactly that minute. Nothing lives in "I'll get to it."
• Plan by the week. A single day is too short to plan well, and a month gets messy. I keep one hour each week for planning, and the rule is simple: my week doesn't start until that hour is done.

As a manager, you don't have to write these rules for your people. Help them write their own, and then protect them.

Rebuild the conditions of your best focus

A participant once asked me for more tricks to get into focus. My answer: ask yourself when were the last two, three or four times you were really effective, really focused, and proud of how you handled something. Then ask what was there.

Those moments hold the clues. I'm not a fan of inventing focus conditions from scratch, and I'm not a fan of borrowing someone else's. You can borrow ideas. But each of us already has a pattern. The work is to study it.

This is a great question for a one-on-one. It tells you more about how to set someone up than any productivity tip.

Then the conditions need protecting. Another participant told me her afternoons kept dissolving and she had no energy left to work in the evening. First I pointed out something uncomfortable: if a busy, active person still manages to protect a few hours of "wasted" time every day, that time is probably meeting some need right now. Fighting it head on is the hard way. It's usually easier to take something you already do with motivation and push it forward.

Then I asked her a question. Not whether she could, but whether she was willing. One fixed hour a day. At a set hour she walks into a room, shuts the door, sets an alarm and works for that hour. She keeps this up for two weeks minimum, even on days when it produces nothing.

I told her what to expect. The first day or two, she'd sit there stuck. By the third or fourth day, things would start to flow. And the freshly freed hour would probably leak at first, because there was still something to unload in it. The challenge is to keep claiming that hour regardless. The shut door is the rule.

So don't judge a new focus block by its first two days. That's exactly when it's about to start working. And some people lose confidence when they stay in planning without moving. Get them into action with something small that fits them now, and have them start today.

Where focus fits in the bigger picture

Focus is one of the things I work on with teams, but it isn't the whole story. Effectiveness can slip for all kinds of reasons, and as a manager you frequently have no direct lever on what's actually causing it.

That is why my workshop, The Results Triangle, is built on a simple model with three points. When someone or a team is performing well, every one of those three is firing at once. Sharpening employee focus is one of the practical tools the workshop covers. The real skill is diagnosing, in real time, which point is weak for this person right now, and strengthening that point specifically. In most cases, that alone lifts results.