Identify your distractions – You need to understand what is distracting you on a daily basis.  For the next two days I want you create a list of things that are distracting you during the day.  You’ll recognize a distraction when you suddenly remember “Oh, that’s right, I need to get this done” instead of what you are focused on at the moment.  Write every single one down even if it you’ve already been distracted by it.  Once you’ve your list, review your distractions and decide if they should be getting your precious focus time.  If not, find ways to remove them.  Learn to say no, or at least, not now.

Create a Top 3 Priority list daily – While humans can focus on many things in a given day, the question is whether that focus is effective.  Time slicing yourself across a dozen priorities just means that you will have a dozen partially completed tasks.  Focus on three, celebrate your completion of them, and then prepare for the next three.  Smaller batches of focus keep you more efficient by reducing the context switching time loss between tasks.

Create Focus time blocks – Find out when you work the best, be it morning or night, and block off one hour windows to focus.  Try to get 2-3 windows a day.  Block off your calendar as focus time and defend that time.  There will be times when you need to give up your focus time but it should be a rare event.  I always find this a hard thing to do but people will come to respect the time blocks in a couple of weeks.  Stay true to your need for focus time.

Tell everyone how to get your attention- One of the biggest challenges of creating focus time is that people fear that they’ve lost their ability to get your time.  Some of these people validly need your time.  Others waste your time on non-priority tasks.  You can protect your focus time by telling people about it.  More importantly, you can teach people when it is important to get a hold of you and when it is not.  By setting boundaries most people will realize they can wait the hour before you have time.

Pull in your communications – This is one of the best ways to improve your productivity and it works to remove those dark patterns.  Those little red circles and message counts are bad.  You are allowing those messages to be pushed to you, which push you around.  Turn them off.  All of them.  Turn off the message alerts.  Turn off the email alerts.  I pull in my email and messages every hour.  This creates focused pockets of time that I deal with those issues that cannot wait.  This coupled with training the people around you to only approach you when it is an emergency is your strongest focus ally.

Email subject lines are important – Teach everyone you work with on how to gain your attention.  There are times when I’ve gotten 400-500 emails in a day.  It is impossible to read all of them and still get work done.  Train your staff on a new email subject line system.  Start every email subject line with what type of interaction they need.  Action.  Decision.  Informational.  Critical.  Let them know that you have to be in the To list of receivers to ensure you know the email is meant for you.  This helps to triage my email and focus on what must be completed today.  Here you need to actively be coaching.  For the first few weeks  you need to respond with things like ‘this really wasn’t a critical issue’ or ‘I don’t see an action I need to take here’.  People adjust quickly.

Break the rules – Finally, you sometimes need to break your own rules.  Sometimes things really do require your immediate attention.  Let your staff know they can phone or contact you if they need to during your focus time.  This takes away the fear of losing access to you.  Over time they will interrupt you less and less for poor reasons as your cost of context switching will result in a loss of over 10 minutes of productive time even just to answer a quick question.