Focus

Not all hours are created equal. Focus is a multiplier on time. 1 hour of focused work is more valuable than many more hours of unfocused, half-assed work (the multiplier depends on the depth of focus).

I try to operationalize this idea in two ways. One is tracking focus-hours instead of just hours; both the amount of time and the depth of work per unit of time are important. This is very hand-wavy because focus is not a numerical quantity that we can measure, but it does account for the comparison mentioned above.

The second is investing time into focus. 9 hours of sleep is better than 6 because having 15 focused hours in my day is better than 18 hours with significantly reduced focus. Exercising for an hour is almost always better than spending that hour working because of the compounding benefits of taking a break from work and engaging in physical activity. Naively maximizing “hours worked” would encourage spending as much time as possible working. But prioritizing focus evidently pays dividends in the long run.

As a rough heuristic, I find that it is actually worthwhile to optimize for focus without much regard for the amount of time worked. Focus is a nonlinear multiplier: the sharpest people can produce days worth of output in hours compared to the average person. As a result, it makes more sense to evaluate what you get out of your time, rather than how much you put in.