Why Focus Matters

Have you ever felt like 24 hours were not enough for a single day? Maybe you needed more time to complete a project, connect with your family, or just get more sleep. While we cannot add more hours to a single day, we can ensure that those hours are spent in a more efficient way.

The goal here is to avoid as much waste as possible. Let’s define waste as resources spent without a significant benefit. In financial areas, the meaning of waste is pretty clear and easy to grasp. When it comes to time, though, it is much more subtle:

Do I waste time on the couch when I watch a movie? Or does it help me to recharge my batteries after a lot of work?

It’s very subjective. Since human beings are very different from robots, we cannot be productive all the time. Hence, let’s focus on work-related activities, as these are usually intended to be productive. Speaking of focus, this is exactly what we want to achieve in order to work more efficiently:

Focus is the ability to concentrate on a single task for a prolonged period of time without getting distracted.

Why is focus so helpful in avoiding wasted time? Because frequent context switching is very expensive. According to research, knowledge workers need between 15 and 25 minutes to refocus on an unfinished task after an interruption. An incoming phone call, a recent chat message, that flashy advertisement: It costs you a real chunk of lifetime each day. In fact, you lose much more time than you spend interacting with the interruption.

Next time, we are going to talk about concepts and techniques to improve our focus. Until then, I am interested in hearing your opinion on context switching and focus: Is multitasking just for computers or actually useful for human beings?

Note: You can also find this episode on YouTube and Spotify.

#TimeManagement #Focus #ContextSwitching #MultiTasking #SoftwareEngineering