Steve Prentice's Blog, page 9

What I Have Learned as a Cloud Security Professional

My blog post for cloud security firm (ISC)2 , entitled, What I Have Learned as a Cloud Security Professionals is available for review at CloudTweaks.com. Based on interviews with security experts, as well as with David Shearer, CEO of (ISC)2, the post discusses some of the lessons learned and challenges faces by the people who seek to keep companies and organizations safe from cloud-based attack.  Click here to read.

Amazon Pay-per-page: Books-as-a-Service?

This blog post, written for HP’s Business Value Exchange , entitled No Longer Doing It by the Book: The Rise of the As-a-Service Industry is available for review at CloudTweaks.com. This post discusses Amazon’s policy of paying authors by the number of pages read, rather than by number of books sold. It only applies to the Amazon library at this point – not retail – but does it signify the beginning of an industry change? Click here to read.

The Bitcoin-Blockchain Centerless Economy

This blog post, written for HP’s Business Value Exchange , entitled The ‘Centerless’ Economy is available for review at CloudTweaks.com. The post proposes that the engine behind BitCoin, called the BlockChain, will have a huge impact on every area of life that involves transactions and records – which means pretty much everything. Click here to read.

Scheduling Time to be in The Zone

It’s a sad expectation that many people hold over themselves and over the ones with whom they work, that there is some sort of energy level that exists constantly throughout the entire day. The expectation is something akin to electrical current, which many have grown used to as a constant source of stable power – 110 volts, sixty cycles per second, at least in North America. The thought is that any human being can simply return to that level at will, or better yet, never leave it – working at a constant pace throughout the day.

The truth is a far cry from this. The human body operates in waves and cycles, not a continuous stream. All people have good times-of-day and less-than-good times of day, based on a collection of influences, including hormones, stress, sleep, food, interest, mood, health, and much more. A wiser course of action, one that would help more people find their zone of greatest productivity is to recognize that the optimum time comes once per day, and once it is identified, it should be defended vigorously from both external and internal attack.

Most people, eight out of ten in any group, will identify themselves as morning people. This means they feel more focused, alert and capable in the morning than any other time of the day. The other twenty percent will likely identify themselves as night owls; they are chemically aligned with the evening and are likely to do their best thinking, working between 4:00 p.m. and midnight, if the job allowed.

In both cases, morning people and night owls are identifying their circadian rhythm, an internal timekeeping mechanism that the body uses to release the hormones for healthy sleep, alertness, hunger and so on. This rhythm has peaks and valleys, much like a roller-coaster. For morning people, the pinnacle of alertness and ability happens generally between 8:30 and 10:00 a.m. and is helped along by the presence of sunlight, the ingestion of caffeine, and the energy of getting to work.

This means that the best time of the entire day for eighty-percent of the workforce is the first half of the morning. It goes downhill from there. Many morning people experience a “second wind” around 4:00 as they anticipate imminent departure from their work obligations, and conversely they often feel a deep drag on their energies during the mid-afternoon period, 2:30 to 3:30, a double-whammy of post-lunch digestion plus an oddity of the circadian rhythm that makes many humans lightly mirror their period of deepest sleep, twelve hours prior.

Finding the right physical and mental zone for optimum work must then follow two simple truths: first it only happens basically once a day, and second, it lasts 90 minutes, maximum.

This means that to get into a zone of excellent productivity, one must know when this optimum time is, schedule it into the calendar, and defend it against attack from emails, meetings, and interruptions. The norm for most North American workers is to arrive at 9:00, and immediately check email. This is somewhat on par with using a Ferrari to pull a travel trailer. All that energy and excellence being redirected towards mundane tasks.

To get into the zone, and to stay there for as long as possible, the following items are required:

First, as stated, an awareness of when the circadian best time of day is.
Second a statement, through the calendar and other communications, for people to stay away during this time. This does not have to be a negative message or a threat. Simply something like “9:00 -10:00 is my focus hour – I will be available to talk to you after 10:00.”
Third, set up a workspace that defends against attack. An office with a door is nice, but focused body language, and a practiced skill at avoiding eye contact also works well, even in the most open of open concept offices.
Fourth, an awareness that this zone period will come to an end quite quickly. This helps fend off distraction and procrastination which often happens when projects are assigned open-ended times for completion.
Fifth, a willingness to turn off or mute all distracting devices – the phone, email, Twitter – anything that serves to pull attention away. For people whose job requires an instant check of all emails coming in, this rule can be bent somewhat to allow the scanning of email subject lines, but to put off actual answering of all but the most urgent of messages until after the zone period is done.

This all may sound like a tall order, but human beings are not made to cruise along at a fixed level of ability. We are sprinters – using energy and conserving it in a rhythmic manner that has not changed in over 50,000 years. Developing an awareness of the timing of your “zone,” whether it be in the morning for morning people, or late afternoon for night owls, and then defending it, is a shrewd and profitable step towards optimum productivity.

More information on truly effective Time Management is available in my book, Cool-Time: A Hands-On Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time. To order a copy, visit the Lulu.com online store for paperback or ebook.

The Value of Interruptions

This post originally appeared in the September 2014 issue of Time Management magazine.

What’s an interruption worth? Many people state that at-work interruptions are time-wasters, and they may be right. But then again, it might depend. Does every interruption cost, or can some be beneficial? It is really up to each individual to decide, and then to control the situation accordingly.

For example, for people who really need time to focus on work, an interruption always seems costly. Colleagues poke their heads in and ask “got a moment?” and emails arrive seemingly at random. In these situations the average working human is put on the defensive, trying to protect what little time is available from attack. Although such terminology may sound harsh, this is actually what is happening: a person’s time is placed under siege.

If self-directed, focus time is indeed needed, then it must be protected in advance. This can best be done by managing the expectations of interrupters themselves.

A proven technique for deflecting interruption is to announce both the start-time and the end-time of a focus period. This can be communicated online in a group email, posted as an online calendar entry, announced at team meetings, included in voicemail greetings and “out-of-office” email autoreplies and printed out as a sign posted on the outside of the office door or cubicle wall: “I am in focus time, back at 11:00.”

The secret here is to give co-workers and customers a comfortable understanding of when they will actually be able to get the attention they seek. When there is no other frame of reference, other than the phrase “I’m kind of busy right now,” a visitor tends to take matters into his/her own hands and push through. However, if potential interrupters are given an awareness of when the door will re-open, they are more likely to shape their actions around this fact. Successful interruption deflectors, then, basically set up “times of availability.”

But it is also important to allow a mild breaking of the rule, as in “if a question can be asked and answered in under a minute, then I will take your interruption.” This is done to help avoid forcing others to spin their wheels, waiting for the focus period to end. In short, if a query can be answered in under a minute, come on in. Otherwise comeback at 11:00.

When defined start- and end-times are scheduled and explained, in a positive tone of voice, they stand a better chance of being accepted and respected by a team. The benefits of establishing such a fortress of time include being able to work both interruption-free and guilt-free, certainly, but also there is the benefit of eliminating non-emergencies from filling the plate. Very often an individual will interrupt simply to pursue the path of least resistance; however, being asked to come back later might actually result in the interrupter either a.) Doing the task themselves; b.) Asking a different person to do the task; or c.) Becoming involved in something else, and forgetting to come back at all. Thirdly, a defined visiting time teaches/encourages colleagues to get all their ducks in a row before coming back to speak. It helps reinforce the idea that socializing is welcome in common office space, but that a private office/cubicle is for work. Time, after all, is money.

However, there may also be strategic benefits to allowing interruptions. To take advantage of the opportunity to chat with a colleague might result in a greater, more lucrative or more satisfying work assignment; or it might serve to strengthen bonds between people – relationships that may have great payoff in the future, or it might simply offset the need for a scheduled meeting at a later time. Interruptions from direct reports also allow for better ground-level understanding of employees’ concerns or ideas – an excellent leadership move, and a fulfillment of the open-door policy.

When an interruption stands to deliver greater value than isolation, then the interruption should be factored in as part of the work window. That’s the key point: factoring them in. Traditionally people forget to do this. If, for example, a person assigns 60 minutes to get a report finished, and an interruption steals away 20 of those minutes, then focus time is lost and must be caught up somehow. This results in a measure of mental stress, which in turn trims back on mental capacity due to the way in which the human body and brain always shut down portions of higher-level thinking when urgency and worry appear. This means that the completion of the report will take far longer.

However, if a person were to schedule 90 minutes to complete a 60-minute task, budgeting for acceptable interruptions, then the sense of control is retained. A person in this situation can allow an interruption, and with practice, can not only benefit from a strengthened interpersonal relationship, but can use that sense of control to draw the conversation to a timely close, and then return to work with the same level of focus as they enjoyed prior to the interruption. This is because throughout this exercise, control is retained. The interruption is not stealing productive time, since it has been budgeted for.

This is the pragmatic reality of work. The optimist inside each person says, “a 60-minute task should take 60 minutes”; but the pragmatist says, “it is better to expect to get it done in 90 minutes, and roll with the punches.

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Making Time for Reviews

This post originally appeared in the August 2014 issue of Time Management magazine.

Back in the 1980s New York City had a mayor by the name of Ed Koch. He was generally well-liked, and was instrumental in helping clean up the city, and was a very public figure. His trademark greeting was to walk up to average people on the street and say “How am I doing?” This obvious flip-around on the normal way of greeting people symbolized his ongoing desire for feedback from constituents, tourists and anyone who happened to be in the city. It was a request for an impromptu performance review, and it had the double benefit of both an informal poll of his performance as well as a savvy piece of marketing as the mayor that cares.

Mayor Koch, and other political figures like him, take a risk, realizing that the answer will not always be positive. But knowing where dissatisfaction exists represents the first step towards fixing what needs to be fixed, and building what needs to be built. This is doubly important in situations where the source of dissatisfaction – the thing needing to be improved – is currently a total unknown.

Reviews, then, form part of the project management required to get things done. They are an essential component that appear at first glance to take time, but in the long run save much more.

Project management is filled with procedures like this, and for good reason. There is no direct path from A to B. Contingencies, learning and review are part of the single right road towards success.

Consider, for example, the need to make a Plan B and a Plan C in a project. Many impatient project managers or their stakeholders will balk at this, considering it to be a waste of time and money, as well as an admission of the possibility of failure. It is better, they think, to cross your fingers and charge ahead. But almost all projects are saved thanks to the time and effort put into contingency planning, because things always go wrong in some fashion. Failure, the word of project management, is not an emotional admission of abject defeat, it is instead an alternate outcome that if planned for, drives the project toward success a little further down the road.

So it is with reviews. They require time to plan, time to execute and time to digest the information learned. But this is time invested, not time spent. Reviews allow a manager to learn about employees while demonstrating a level of care and respect toward these employees that is in itself a tool for retention and motivation. Reviews are the essence of kaizen, the principle of continuous improvement that is a hallmark of great leadership and progress. Reviews also break down the communication wall that has been thrown up by the overuse of email – a sterile messaging medium that does nothing to establish the trust, goodwill and passion that all employees deserve to feel.

As a legitimate tool of proactive management, the time required to plan, conduct and learn from reviews must be implemented into a calendar as actual recurring items, not merely reminders on a ToDo list somewhere. These items are part of the work of the day and need to be legitimized as such. People often bristle at this concept, stating that there is already too much other work to be done, however those who choose to add essential support items to their calendar find that instead of adding to the pile, the scheduling of review periods helps define the other work zones far more easily – basically trimming from wasteful activities such as taking too much time to respond to emails or having overly long conversations.

Reviews, then, should be a weekly entity when it comes to communicating with employees, but they should also be a daily task for the individual. A simple block of ten minutes at the end of each workday is usually sufficient for individuals to accomplish three things:

1.) retroactively update their calendar to more accurately reflect the true durations of activities. This is extremely important for people who bill by the hour, as well as for a kaizen activity in its own right, quantifying activities such as meetings and e-mail returning times, travel times, and focused work times in order to assess whether too much or too little attention is being given to each;

2.) taking note of personal errors or activities in need of improvement. These items can be shared with mentors in order to learn better ways of handling them.

3.) for people tasked with giving reviews to other employees, the close of the day is the best time to take notes on their achievements or behaviour, since it is always too difficult and unfair to try and remember an event many weeks later.

Reviews, both daily and weekly, personal and interpersonal, are maintenance and improvement activities, seemingly disassociated from key tasks, but in truth they are as connected to the success of a project or team as car maintenance is to the arrival at a destination. They have to be done, and as such, they have to be made real.

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Redefining “Results”

This post originally appeared in the July 2014 issue of Time Management magazine.

People who seek advice on time management often tend to lust after the concept of winning back more hours in the day in order to get things done. “If only there was a way to freeze time,” they say, or “If I could just squeeze another hour or two out of the day, I could get caught up.”

Well, maybe, but consider the following non-time-related issue:

A friend comes to you and says, “I have a problem with credit cards. I am maxed out, I am paying hundreds of dollars per month in payments and I feel I am getting nowhere. What should I do?”

Many people, in seeking to answer such a question might reply, “cut up your credit card,” or get a loan or a line of credit and pay off the balance right now.” These are two highly practical suggestions, but they will not solve the problem. They will not achieve the desired result.

A person with a credit card has a spending problem. The habit of spending on credit, of giving in to the temptation or distraction of the immediate will not be cured by removing the debt or destroying the card. A person who cuts up a credit card can still shop online and a person who converts a credit card debt into a bank debt will quickly have two sets of debt, as the freshly emptied balance gets used again.

The trick to successful credit card management is to develop new habits that replace old ones. Habit such as paying only with money available, or diligently paying the credit card balance to zero every week. These habits take time and effort, and the odds in favour of relapse are great.

The same thing applies to tasks and time. People who win back an hour or two in their day, either by delegating some work, eliminating it entirely, or cutting back on the time spent in meetings or responding to email, only to fill those newly-won hours with more of the same have achieved nothing. Nothing, that is, except a form of ergonomic inflation. It’s like saying “I have learned how to speed-read and speed-type. Now, instead of handling 100 emails per day, I can handle 200.” Is that really an achievement? Do those extra emails deliver twice the success, or do they simply add more redundancy to the pile?

The issue here is a difference in results. Being able to do twice as many largely impractical tasks, may feel like achievement, but it truly isn’t.

One application of the Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 Rule) is that 80% of the value of a meeting happens within 20% of its duration. So why do meetings last as long as they do? Because they can. Why do we reply to as many emails as we do? Because we can.

In short, if a person is actually able to win back two, three or four hours of extra productivity time in the day, they had better be very sure of what they plan to do with it, because much like a freshly cleared credit card debt, it can refill awfully fast.

So how to ensure all time is well-spent? Through adequate planning. Investing in a small amount of time to plan the day means that everything can be accounted for. An email that contains a task request that will take more than two minutes to complete should be promoted into a scheduled activity. What about the crisis-of-the-day that almost always happens? Schedule it anyway. If it has better than 75% odds of happening sometime after 9:00 a.m. today, then assign a moveable block of time on your calendar right now, and fill in its name and official start time later.

The goal here is to stay totally aware of the value of every minute of the day. If every credit card came with an app that revealed the true price of every item purchased on credit, for example a $100 small appliance actually costing $700 after three years of interest and late payment charges, many people would rethink a spontaneous purchase.

That’s how planning can achieve results. Genuine productivity happens when the value of the work done exceeds the sensation of work being done. In other words business instead of busy-ness. A result should always represent a positive outcome, not merely an outcome.

Willpower through Words

This post originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Time Management magazine.

Picture this: you’re hungry. You’re walking along and you spy a fast-food restaurant. You know that the food they offer is not as good for you as it should be. High numbers in the calorie, cholesterol and sodium columns to be sure. If you care about such things, then you know this food is not really right for you. But it is very hard to resist. Fast food is manufactured to taste and smell wonderful. There’s a science to all of it, right down to the choice of colours used in the branding: that wonderful shade of red that human beings look to when they are in search of something to satisfy the hunger urge – it’s there, on the signs, the posters and the cups.

The people behind the science of fast food know that urges are stronger than common sense. Instinctive desires win out. People always give in to emotion and to desire, since these things are simply stronger. Using willpower to try to stick to some better plan is a herculean task quite simply because it is not natural for a person to act consciously against one’s own urges. Urges are based on instinct. Instinct is based on survival. Ultimately pure biological life relies on listening to instinct.

So willpower doesn’t stand a chance. Or does it?

The best way to avoid succumbing to the urge to devour a calorie-laden, fat-laden fast food meal is to inoculate against the urge by feeding on logic in advance. This technique applies to other areas of life as well, of course, including time management.

Inoculating against hunger requires taking specific steps to avoid getting hungry, primarily by grazing on healthy snacks throughout the day – snacks such as raw vegetables, dried fruits, and nuts. This keeps the body and its blood sugar level pretty even, and avoids becoming ravenous. This represents willpower on the food front.

On the time management front, the most common circumstance in which willpower is required is when procrastinating on a disliked task, or when seeking to implement a new practice, such as returning email in blocks rather than individually, and hence resisting the urge to respond to them right away.

In both cases, of the procrastinated task and the new habit, tangible notes (words on paper or screen) take the place of healthy snacks, and achieve the same result. If a person is putting off a task because they fear it or simply do not like it, then plotting the task or the reason for the task on a piece of paper or Word document provides an opportunity to assess the task with fresh eyes. Can it be broken up into smaller tasks? Can some or part of it be delegated? Even if the answer is no to both of these questions, writing things out also allows the opportunity to gauge how long the task will take, and to see what’s coming up next. There is always an end to even the worst of tasks, and being able to visualize the end is a great motivator. It represents a known conquering an unknown.

The same applies to new habits being introduced to an existing lifestyle. Written, planned steps, including reminders in calendars and checklists, rids the mind of the need to remember and emotionally reassess the effort required to make a change. Many people pair this with a “turn-off time,” an end point that promises a return to the status quo if the initiative fails. This technique, also referred to as a pilot project, gives a sense of tangible comfort that can overcome fear. In other words, it is a recipe for willpower.

Willpower comes from trumping emotion with logic. It requires tangible tools – words, mostly – to be heard above the volume of an instinctive roar. By visualizing, reviewing reassessing, and re-approaching a task you balance out the powers 51-49 in favour of logic. And that’s all the odds you need to achieve victory over difficult tasks.

Surviving the Corporate Wilderness

This article was first published in the January 16, 2015 issue of Lawyers Weekly magazine. To read it there, click here.

Like navigating a jungle with few tools, finding your way through the corporate structure can be a challenge if you are not prepared. One of the main reasons for this is that too much focus is placed on the trail and not enough on the sounds of the jungle itself.

The art of managing and furthering a career has always been about people, and not tasks. It is easy to think that a lawyer’s job is about getting work done, about submitting files on time and taking care of to-do’s and e-mails, but the truth is, at the end of each of these tasks, there is a person waiting and that is where the attention should go.

An ambitious professional should think very hard about applying the 80/20 rule to the work week; specifically, giving 20 per cent of every given week over to planning and communication. Planning is important because it allows you to schedule your most important and lucrative work to the times of the day when you are at your best (for most of us, this points to the morning hours).

However, communication is where the future actually happens, because this is where relationships are built, along with the credibility and reputation that will put you in good stead for the next stage of your career.

Talk and listen

Talking to colleagues and clients, and listening to what they say gives you the opportunity to understand their interests, their personality type, and their style. This does three powerful things.

First, you learn what motivates them. It allows you to hear what their problems and fears are, which in turn empowers you to help resolve those fears. Are they procrastinators? Poor delegators? A-type personalities with no patience? Unable to trust? The issues that burn within a colleagues’ emotional space are the issues you can help solve.

Second, conversations demonstrate acknowledgement. You are acknowledging the hard work, fears and issues that this person deals with. To acknowledge someone is to give them dignity, which is the essence of leadership. They will warm up to you, since you have demonstrated care. They will want more of that good treatment and will act differently in order to get it.

This leads to the third benefit: influence. People will do what you want them to do when there is something in it for them. They will also be open to negotiation regarding timelines, delegation, payment or other task- or career-related matters. They will leave you alone when you want to be left alone and they will arrive ready when you want them to be available.

The reason communication is important from a career management standpoint is that all the people that surround you — your clients, your managers, your colleagues and your direct reports — have influence on your career. What you learn from them might alert you to an actual opportunity.

More importantly, you might be better able to create your own opportunity — your own advancement on your career path — by talking, listening, learning and teaching, and then offering solutions. Even something as simple as negotiating shorter meetings means more time for you to do more valuable work.

To extend the jungle analogy further, it is important to become a hunter, rather than a grazer. Instead of waiting for a job posting to appear, it is up to you to hunt down the type of work you want and that can only happen when people know about you and when they value you. A person who works 100 per cent of the time on billable work might appear valuable as a revenue generator, but they allow themselves no time to identify better methods of using their talents and no time to communicate their potential to others. They are simply a cash cow and will move no further up the line.

Stay valuable

What do you know about the world outside that you can share with others? Do you have a Twitter account that feeds you information about trends and developments in business that you could use to solve peoples’ problems, or have you dismissed Twitter as a meaningless toy?

Twitter is power. By choosing to follow relevant, proactive thinkers and commentators — other lawyers and journalists, for example — you stand to know more than the people around you. You will become a centre of influence. It will be you who proposes better, cost-saving alternatives to current work practices, or who learns how to deliver more up-to-date proactive solutions and guidance to clients, which is what every professional firm strives to do.

Twitter is the drumbeat of the business jungle. It is there to tell you what you need to know. You are free to ignore the 99.9 per cent of users whose content is meaningless, but to ignore the remaining 0.1 per cent means cutting off your career lifeline. There is good, valuable information out there: valuable to you, but more importantly, valuable to others and deliverable through you.

Plan and keep alert

Life is too short to wait for things to happen. You must make them happen. Allow time in your schedule, per the 80/20 rule, to give yourself time to think and strategize.

First, strategize forward: What are you looking for? A management position? A more balanced life? A fixed number of hours? A larger departmental budget? Do you want to lead a team or work alone?

Your goals should be clear, measurable, specific and linked to the firm’s focus. Once your goals are set, set a timeline: when do you want this by? For example: “One year from now I will oversee a team of four, I will work no later than 5:30 p.m., and I will have moved up one pay grade.” Do this by writing your ideas down across an axis of time. This makes it far easier to motivate yourself to identify the people you need to network with and to justify the time required to be with them.

The execution of any plan demands review. Mistakes will be made, but gains will also be made. Connect with mentors. Share your plan with them, and share both your successes and failures to date. No plan is — or should ever be — rock-solid and inflexible.

When roadblocks appear, the solution will come from communicating with those who created the roadblocks, perhaps, but also with those who have the power to remove those barriers. Mentors, too, play a great role in providing an alternate perspective or simply a voice of experience.

If you were in an actual jungle, the best thing you could do to find your way to safety would be to get to higher ground. A hilltop gives the lay of the land, reveals pathways and traps, and transforms the voyage from an unknown to one that is at least partially knowable.

The corporate jungle is much the same. Lift your gaze up from the trail immediately in front of you and pay greater attention to what is around you.

Finding Focus

Focus is not a natural human activity; it must be learned and perfected, inside and out. For example, anyone who has ever asked a four-year-old child to sit still for five minutes knows that this is a virtually impossible task. The body and mind need to move, and young children, not yet yoked by the social obligations that come with maturity, express their desire to shift and fidget with great predictability.

We may all grow older, but that internal desire to fidget and move still remains. It is an offshoot of the primordial need to be aware of and reactive to our environment, to be able to avoid danger and pounce upon opportunity as needed. Focus is too narrow to be of use as a survival tool.

This is bad news for harried professionals, desperately seeking a few moments of focus in the midst of a busy day. If by some chance quiet descends upon the workplace, we know it will not last long, for soon another email will arrive, another colleague or customer will come to call, or another issue will make its presence known. The tasks that require total concentration will get put off once again, resulting in a decrease in overall productivity and a corresponding dip in morale.

Attaining focus requires an ability to conquer both internal and external detractors, which, fortunately have one thing in common: people.

To develop true focus, you first have to fend people off.

People are the sources of interruptions, and interruptions are external destroyers of focus.

You must basically be able to tell people to leave you alone for a set period of time. This is not as career-limiting as it sounds. Although colleagues may not sympathize with your busy-ness, their own self-interest will be comforted by your announcement of an end-time: “I will be available at 11:00” sounds much more accommodating than “go away and leave me alone.” By giving people a fixed “known” instead of a vague “unknown”, their expectations can be managed and their actions can be guided. Similarly, use your voicemail greeting to inform callers as to when they can expect a return call, and inform people verbally that you generally reply to emails and texts within an hour or so. Give them a sense of when they can expect attention from you. If you do not give them this guideline, they will revert to the automatic expectation of immediate response, which puts you back in the corner. The goal is to fend off intrusions by satisfying their fear of the unknown (as in “when will I get a reply?”) in advance.

This keep-away approach allows you to work guilt-free, knowing that the needs of your colleagues and customers have been proactively met; working guilt-free minimizes stress, which tends to maximize the distribution of nutrients and oxygen to the processing areas of the brain, which results in greater capacity to focus.

Once you have successfully fended off external interrupters, you must next fend off internal distractors – these are self-initiated destroyers of focus, as follows:


Visual distraction: align your body and vision to allow only the work at hand to fill your field of vision. Looking up and around not only allows your mind to become distracted, but making eye contact with passers-by is the clearest of invitations for a drop-in visitor, not only now, but into the future as well. If you fear being perceived as anti-social when you adopt such a closed position, take the time to inform your colleague in advance as to what you are doing and why. They might be interested in adopting these practices themselves.
Auditory distraction: use headphones to play music, white noise or pink noise to mask the ambient sounds around you. Since most of us are not capable of tuning out the sounds around us, a “cone of concentration” is the next best thing. There is a terrific selection of music for working and concentrating available online, and even if your office does not allow streaming, many of these can be downloaded for playback later through your phone or music player. Headphones or ear buds, by the way, make excellent props that say “do not disturb.”
Moving to a neutral space such as a coffee shop also offers great potential for focus, since the ambient noise of a coffee shop is generally sufficiently neutral to become a curtain of comfortable sound.


Know your attention span. People have different capacities for focus. Some people can work for hours without a break. Artists such as painters, composers, film editors and writers sometimes call this “flow” – the tunnel vision of creativity. Others call it “getting into the groove.” But if you find yourself needing a break after twenty minutes, do not despair. It is more important that you know yourself and the activities that you are capable of. For example, to work for twenty minutes and then to take a two-minute break, gives a type of pause and refreshment on par with rest between sets of exercise at the gym; it gives the body the opportunity to move forward without exhaustion. So, as paradoxical as it may sound, one of the best contributors to effective focus may actually be regular breaks. Just be sure these breaks are initiated and controlled by you, not someone else. That makes all the difference.
Break your work up over days or weeks. If you are dealing with a long-term project that requires many hours of focused work, consider scheduling the work as a recurring activity, such as every weekday between 3:00 and 4:00. By making it an appointment in your calendar, this activity defends its existence against intruders such as other meetings or commitments; but more importantly, human memory is very good at picking up where it left off, thus minimizing setback and capitalizing on a “momentum of focus” that carries over from day-to-day.

To prove this concept, think about what you were doing “this time last week.” No matter what time of the day, or day of the week that you are reading this article, it is likely that if you think back to what you were doing exactly one week ago, you might find yourself asking the question, “was that really a week ago?” That is due to a variation of human situational memory that tends to build bridges across time, when recognizing familiar landmarks. The same reaction will happen when you revisit a place that you have not been to for a decade or more; familiarity and recall will make it seem like “just yesterday” that you were here, even if the trees have become larger and certain buildings have changed.

In sum, focus can be bridged the same way, across days and weeks, giving larger projects a chance at succeeding.

Park extraneous thoughts, do not ignore them. If, while working on Task A, an idea regarding Task B pops into your head, then take a moment to write it down before continuing. This phenomenon is very likely, since the brain does a great deal of its processing obliquely, when not focusing on the problem at hand. Consequently, since your mind is not focusing on Task B, it is more relaxed about that task and is more likely to come up with ideas and solutions pertaining to it.

By acknowledging this idea and committing it to either paper or a saved file, you give yourself permission to let go of the idea and move on. By contrast, if you struggle to keep that idea in your head, you will do a disservice to both Tasks A and B, by reducing the processing capacity available for Task A, and ultimately forgetting the bright idea that you had for Task B.

Furthermore, by recording this good idea, you actually create space for additional good ideas, which becomes another paradox of great focus. By focusing on one task, you actually open yourself up to creativity on other task fronts as well.

Ultimately it must be recognized that focus is by and large a practiced skill. We as humans must remember how to do it, when to do it, and what external and internal detractors must be addressed and dealt with in order to set the stage for undisturbed processing to happen. This “practiced skill” will eventually lengthen the amount of time that you personally have for great focus, first, socially, by addressing the habits and expectations of the people around you, and next by flexing and strengthening the internal “muscles” of concentration, which, like all other muscles in the body, thrive and grow through increased use.