Focus

My parents used to rather cruelly describe me as “Butterfly Mind”, hopping from one thing to the next. It’s one up from having a goldfish brain, but still not very complimentary. As I’ve got older the butterfly trait has persisted in some parts of my life. I can be like a jackdaw, captivated by new shiny things. One former bp boss described me that way to an incoming boss – helpful. But whilst there have been things with which I persist (much to my children’s relief), there is more than a grain of truth in the unsolicited feedback. For my final animal kingdom analogy: I have the attention span of a gnat (- or a goldfish).

This has been relatively positive at bp, where there’s always something new going on – and I’ve often found myself involved. I am self-starter, good at getting things off the ground. But…

I open up too many fronts - a new startup, a new blog, daily Instagram posts, mentoring, consulting, home-schooling - and I don’t knuckle down to what’s priority.

This can mean I leave things that get hard or seem less interesting. Last week I wrote how I shared a hacky demo for Familiarize, didn’t get a whole bunch of positive feedback – and this week unsurprisingly haven’t found time to get back into it.

Meanwhile a new opportunity appeared last weekend: to take on an interim chief marketing officer role in a pretty cool EV/V2G startup that’s just got multi-million $ funding and has a blank sheet of marketing paper. I glance back guiltily as Familiarize slips down the pecking order again.

I shouldn’t beat myself up so much. This is my year of experimenting after about 20 years in corporate life. To find my purpose and build a business out of my passion. A portfolio career. Escaping my comfort zones.  So I should be trying lots of things.

But maybe not all at the same time.

When I was at bp, I found myself in a (new, obviously) scrum master role in Launchpad, bp’s business builder. I learnt a lot about how unproductive we quickly become when we work on too many things in parallel versus in sequence. And how we struggle to complete tasks, but find no problem adding in new ones. Turns out I’m not the only butterfly.

It was vital we tackled this with really disciplined planning, prioritised by mission. We used a tool (Trello) to log each week’s priority tasks for everyone to see as they moved (or didn’t) from Doing to Done.

I’m starting to think I need this myself.

My first task is to get really clear about my priorities.

I need to reset.

I don’t feel particularly well-qualified to advise anyone how to handle this – as I am doing a pretty awful job of it!  But regardless, I think there are some things we can all try:

1.     Write down where we need to be by the end of the year, by mid year and by the end of March. This should set our priorities. For each priority, write down why it’s important to be delivered by then – and test this. Pick no more than three or four if possible.

2.     Visualise what we are going to work on – whether that’s Trello, a piece of paper stuck on the wall – I am envious of the ones of you harbouring whiteboards! Post-its or their online equivalent work well to keep things dynamic so we don’t have to rebuild the visualisation when things change.

3.     Each week write down what we commit to deliver for each of these priorities – add a ticket in Trello or jot it down on paper. Look back at the end of the week and see if we did what we planned and if not work out why. Be honest with ourselves and reflect the learning into next week’s planning.

4.     Try to work on just one single task at a time, rather than spinning lots of plates. Each time we switch tasks our productivity plummets as does the chance of shipping tasks at the end of the week. Some good hacks and the stats around productivity losses here.

5.     Consciously keep a log of things we want to do but that don’t fit into our priorities. If you’re like me, you’ll need this for a creative vent for your ideas. Every so often give ourselves time to develop these ideas, so our focus doesn’t drive us mad.

It’s super hard when we’re working on our own because we lose the rhythm and structure of the week. No daily standup, weekly team meeting or monthly sales get-together. We set our own agenda and the days can very easily drift. Chuck in a bunch of imposter syndrome, distractions at home, reading and research and we can easily lose hours - and days.

Come on, let’s focus! We owe it to ourselves to deliver on our potential. Let me know how you’re going – and share any ideas that are working for you in the comments!

As always, please share the blog with anyone starting out who you think might find it helpful. And follow me on Instagram each day.