Focus on This If You Want To Win
Focus on This If You Want To Win
PLUS: 21 Productivity Hacks That Actually Work
October 25, 2026
“Being strategic with your attention is one of the most valuable skills you can learn.”
\- Julie Fratantoni
One of the biggest challenges I face with clients is getting them to do less.
Not less commitment. Less stuff.
Your cognitive resources are finite, so where you direct your attention matters. A lot.
We live in a distraction economy - a world designed to grab your attention. The endless inbox, the infinite scroll of social media, the 24/7 news cycle.
That’s why we regard attentional control as a key capability of the cognitive athlete - your ability to protect your focus deliberately and direct it where it matters can be transformational to your performance.
Fewer inputs equates to greater output.
This is another lesson I learnt the hard way (and trust me, I’m still a work in progress). Without question I got lost in the ‘glamorisation of busy’ - trying to be across everything, all at once, in the belief that it was a sign of capability.
I was pedal to the metal and lost in the adrenaline rush of it all.
But the best drivers know that going flat out down the straight is the easy part. The skill is in the corners, and they are already looking through the apex to the exit before they get there.
That is relentless focus on where they want to end up.
THE PROOF
In 2011, Facebook had no mobile advertising revenue.
Sheryl Sandberg recalled that when Mark Zuckerberg told an all-hands meeting the company needed to become mobile first, nothing changed.
Teams kept bringing desktop products to product reviews, with a mobile screenshot on the last slide.
So Zuckerberg told them there would be no more product meetings until they came in with the mobile screenshot first, and for a couple of weeks there weren’t any.
Then things began to change.
In June 2012 he opened the annual all-hands by saying the company’s most pressing priority was to become a mobile company.
By July, VP of Product Chris Cox was saying the company was nearing the point where nobody could present a new product concept without a mobile mock-up, and that the mandate came straight from Zuckerberg.
Mobile engineers sat in every product team and hundreds went through iOS and Android training. Zuckerberg’s own first question in product reviews was nearly always what a product looked like on mobile.
The results came quickly. Mobile was 23% of Facebook’s advertising revenue by the end of 2012 and 53% a year later, when a single quarter of mobile ads was worth about $1.25 billion.
Imagine being in Zuckerberg’s shoes during that period, with the sheer volume of issues and people demanding his attention. Here is some of what else was playing out:
- He agreed a $1 billion deal for Instagram.
- Facebook’s IPO was hit by trading glitches (and he got married the next day!).
- By early September the shares had hit a record low of $17.55, more than half below the offering price.
A week later, in his first interview since the IPO, Zuckerberg spent much of the time talking about mobile. He told the audience that how well Facebook did on mobile would shape the next three to five years.
Most leaders would have been pulled towards the most immediate problems, the ones screaming for attention. He stayed focused on the one that would change the trajectory of the company.
Attentional control in action.
THE SCIENCE
Research gives us evidence on what happens to decisions when your attention is divided. But this is one of those occasions where I want to give you the context first.
In a 2010 study, Australian researchers observed 98 nurses giving 4,271 medications at two Sydney teaching hospitals.
They recorded when nurses were interrupted while preparing and giving medication, then compared what they saw with patients’ medication charts to identify errors.
More than half of the medications were given with at least one interruption. Each interruption was associated with a 12.7% increase in clinical errors, such as the wrong dose.
With four interruptions while giving a single medication, the risk of a major error doubled, from 2.3% to 4.7%.
Experience offered no protection against clinical errors.
Lab research suggests why. In 2013, Ross Otto and colleagues at the University of Texas, Princeton and NYU found that when people’s mental resources were occupied by a demanding additional task, they reverted to doing whatever had previously paid off, instead of thinking a step ahead.
When attention is divided, the quality of decisions drops.
THE APPLICATION
People talk about drive and motivation. You now understand that attentional control is just as critical.
Without it, you can end up in ‘spray and pray’ territory - expending all your energy but not moving the needle in any meaningful way.
Here are 4 ways you can train it:
Design your environment
This is massively under-rated in terms of importance. Make it easier for yourself by being intentional about your set-up. Examples include:
- Work with your body clock. Research from Lynn Hasher’s lab at the University of Toronto found that the ability to ignore distraction is strongest at your personal peak time of day, which varies by chronotype. Put the work that needs your full attention there, and leave email and admin for the rest of the day.
- Let a device guard your attention. For example, I use an app called Blok to lock the distracting apps on my phone when I need to focus.
- Decide your response to distraction in advance. A 2006 meta-analysis of 94 tests found that ‘if-then’ plans had a medium-to-large effect on achieving goals, including shielding them from unwanted influences. For example: “If my phone buzzes during deep work, then I’ll leave it face down and finish what I’m doing.”
Switch off your auto-pilot
We get so lost in our always-on world that we lose the ability to take in what’s actually happening around us. That data is incredibly valuable.
In a 2014 speech to graduating students at the University of Virginia, Peyton Manning, one of the greatest quarterbacks in history, captured this brilliantly:
“If you really want to be a game changer, become a master observer. Just the willingness to stop and look at things that no one else has even bothered to look at enables game changers to identify real points of meaning.
“The simple process of focusing on things that are normally taken for granted can be a source of great power and creativity... We learn when we observe, we pick up on clues, we figure things out. That is what preparation is all about.”
Ask yourself honestly how often you do this. If you’re operating at 100mph, you’re going to miss things. It reminds me of the maxim often attributed to the Navy SEALs: “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”
Give people your full attention
Another skill that gets overlooked when talking about attentional control is active listening. As a leader, it’s not just about your ability to focus on your work, it’s about your ability to focus on your people.
A 2022 review by Avraham Kluger and Guy Itzchakov concluded that listening is associated with, and a likely cause of, better performance, trust and wellbeing at work.
Start by putting the phone out of sight. In a 2013 experiment, Andrew Przybylski and Netta Weinstein had strangers talk for ten minutes with or without a phone resting nearby. The pairs with a phone felt less close and rated their conversations lower in quality, most clearly when the topic was personally meaningful.
Know what you need to answer
Josh Waitzkin, chess prodigy turned martial arts world champion and author of ‘The Art of Learning’, recommends focusing on the ‘Most Important Question’ (MIQ).
At the end of the working day, he identifies the most important question in what he’s doing.
He sleeps on it and then the next morning, before being distracted by any external input, whether that’s the news, email or social media, he brainstorms on it in writing.
The beauty of this ritual is that its singular focus helps filter out distractions.
It’s one I constantly use with clients, but I’d urge you to try it as well.
What is your MIQ right now? Because if you can’t even answer it, you know that’s where you should be focusing.
Go well.
J
LIVE BETTER, LEAD BETTER
The best content I researched this week:
1. The danger of reading a newsletter like this is that intentions don’t translate into actions. Neuroscientist Nicole Vignola explains in 5 simple slides why we quit after 2 weeks of doing something new… and how to change that.
2. The 4 habits that can yield asymmetric returns are explained in less than 2 minutes by investor and author Graham Weaver. Spoiler alert: the third one ties in perfectly with this week’s focus.
3. I’m normally cynical about this type of thing, but there’s actually a ton of good, practical advice in this list of 21 productivity hacks. A lot of it echoes exactly what you’ve just been reading about.
4. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond is one of the best books I’ve ever read, so when he speaks about what makes great leaders and how to live an extraordinary life, you can be sure I'm going to listen. You should as well.
Share this with a fellow leader - we’re stronger together.
If this was forwarded to you, join hundreds of other top-level executives and entrepreneurs by subscribing here.
The Prime Performance Program
