focus – James Osborn

Choose your Time

It’s better to spend a few hours a day doing important work than filling ten or a dozen with activities that don’t move you towards achieving your goals.

Kick it off by making sure you know what’s actually important to you. Do the work to understand your values, and then frame your goals.

Then, take stock of the current situation. Where does your effort go? Track your time to understand it. You’ll learn something for sure!

How much effort goes towards wasteful activities that are low value to you? Can you delegate away, or maybe just not do them at all? Recurring meetings are an area worth particular focus. Review your calendar, and try to cancel, short or spread out as many as possible.

Next up, where are your high value activities? There are probably not enough yet. Look at where you are doing good work. Can you extend these slots with the time you’ve just saved?

Big spans of time are better for doing activities that lead to real change, so extending an hour to two is powerful option.

If you can’t do this yet, then go back to that calendar and look at those gaps. If it’s anything like mine was, you’ll have a patchwork of meetings, with small gaps between them. You’ve cleared out the cruft now, so there’s not much left to get rid of.

Instead, start shuffling. Meetings you own are easiest, but any small group session is up for grabs. Two things help here. Knowing your own high performance times, so you can keep them clear for focused work. Then knowing your organisations culture. Start of week for team syncs? Planning mid-week? Retrospectives and demos on Fridays? There’s a cadence there. If it’s a big org, then understanding this is key, you’ll struggle to shift this culture quickly. If it’s small or just getting started, then it’s not fixed yet, so don’t be afraid to grab it and shape it a bit.

Now you’ve made the space, you have to keep it. Hold the time with calendar bookings that highlight the great work you are doing. Stay strong when people inevitably try to overbook and just say “No” (or at least offer a time outside your focus space).

Choose how you spend your time, and you’ll spend more of it contributing towards your goals and achieving the successes you deserve.

This or That?

A few days ago, I was observing a coaching practice session. The coachee was very generous, they would answer any question with a long and extremely complete answer. The coach was keen to probe into these answers and focus on the areas that were most important to the coachee.

“Do you want to do this or that?” – A common mistake from a novice coach trying to bring focus to the conversation.

When you use this approach, you are limiting the coachee to a couple of options that you have selected, and you are using your words to channel the conversation.

Imagine you ask the coachee “Do you want to go left or right?”. You have closed off the possibility of them continuing straight ahead, pausing for a while or maybe even turning around and taking another route!

When you present a binary choice, then the usual answer is one of those options, even if that wasn’t the best choice for the coachee, or it loses a lot of nuance in the answer.

Instead, gain the focus you seek by asking the coachee to tell you what’s most important to them. You can summarise back the various options they’ve provided, and use words like specific or one to build the focused response.

Which one of these is most important to you?
What specifically is the area you’d like to focus on?
You’ve mentioned five things, which of those is your top concern?
If you could only change one of these, which would it be?

All of these questions leave the power with the coachee to choose and provide the focus. You haven’t forced them to a particular channel, but you will move the conversation forwards!