What founders get wrong about focus

Being a founder means having to move between different types of work, because the nature of the job requires you to constantly be wearing multiple hats. While this can be a fantastic training ground for developing new skills, it makes learning how to focus effectively much harder. Traditional productivity advice does not account for the fact that many apparent distractions for founders can be legitimate responsibilities they must pay attention to. A common misconception I’ve seen among fellow founders is the tendency to confuse focus with being busy. When we can tick several tasks off our to-do lists, we feel good because completing something gives us a sense of reward and motivates us to keep going. The risk is that this motivation is usually fueled by the easiest tasks, and we lack the discipline to decide whether each task actually deserves our focus. To understand why, we need to be clear about what focus means. We often use the term focus to describe the willpower to sit at a desk for a long period of time and complete the work in front of us. I would call this concentration, which is an important skill, but is not the same as focus. Concentration can be applied to any task, …