Why Managing Attention Is the Key to Effective Leadership

IN MANY organizations, productivity is flat while stress and burnout are climbing. While many blame the unmanageable workload, the problem is really the overwhelming thoughtload. Thoughtload is the invisible tax on performance and productivity that comes from a treacherous triad of rising cognitive demands, escalating emotional burdens, and declining energy reserves. As thoughtload increases, it’s less likely that team members will be productive, creative, or collaborative.

Managers need to support their teams in reducing each component of thoughtload, but first, they need to address their own chaotic experience. It’s impossible to manage the madness if you’re creating it.

Focus Your Distracted Attention

While the endgame is for you to reduce your team’s thoughtload, you cannot manage the madness if you’re caught up in it. Just think of all the ways your thoughtload impacts your team members. If your attention is diluted across a vast range of issues and initiatives, your team won’t know what to prioritize. If you’re nervous, impatient, demoralized, or hostile, you’ll pass that emotionality on to your people. If you’re run down, exhausted, and uninspired, how do you expect your direct reports to have pep in their step?

You need to tackle your thoughtload first. But where to start, given that your attention, emotions, and energy are so intimately intertwined? I always tackle attention first, because you have no hope of taming emotions or restoring energy if you don’t manage your attention.

The Achievable Ambition: Focused and Flowing

Before we talk about how to effectively focus your attention, let’s agree on what “good focus” would look like. I’m not promising you that you can achieve Zen master status, but I’m promising you that you can create a world where you experience periods of deep concentration, leading to productive work and a sense of accomplishment. What if you could experience this:

Delivering multiple high-quality pieces of work you’re proud of each week
Feeling the satisfaction of accomplishing something worthwhile
Creating enough slack to accommodate urgent issues and disruptions to your plans
Strengthening connections and engaging fully in conversations at work and home
Falling asleep quickly because the intrusive thoughts have simmered down

Science Synopsis

What’s going on in your body and mind when your attention is distracted?

To put it simply, your brain is a mono-tasker, not a multi-tasker. For the most part, you can pay attention to only one thing at a time. Sure, you can walk and chew gum, but that’s because you don’t need to pay conscious attention to do either. If you switch out gum chewing for walking and texting, you’ll get a different result. Your attention goes to texting, not walking, and you’re okay until there’s a bump on the sidewalk.

While you feel like you’re multitasking, what you’re actually doing is toggling—switching your attention from one thing to the other. It turns out that toggling is inefficient:

Your productivity decreases
It takes longer to complete both tasks
The quality of your task suffers as well

And multitasking doesn’t just slow you down; it gets you down. Attempts to multitask are associated with increased stress, heightened anxiety, and even temporary depressive symptoms.

When it comes to thoughtload, multitasking is part of a vicious cycle. When you’re anxious about how much you have to do, you tend to multitask to alleviate anxiety. Ironically, instead of helping you plough through more work, multi-tasking can make you less productive, leaving you with more to do, which in turn makes you even more stressed. Brutal! If multitasking doesn’t work, why do we keep attempting it? That’s another aspect of the vicious cycle. The more tired and overwhelmed you are (the energy component of thoughtload), the poorer your brain is at calibrating what you should attend to and what you should ignore. Instead of focusing on the most important thing, you prioritize based on more primal criteria like recency (What was the latest notification to ping?), fear (Who’s the scariest person breathing down your neck?), or comfort (What’s the easiest or most fun thing you could strike off your to-do list?) When you make one of these suboptimal prioritization decisions, you dig yourself into a deeper hole. Bad attention choices lead to poor outcomes for your emotions and your energy.

A Better Alternative

What does science tell us about a better alternative?

Most of us work more effectively when we focus on one thing at a time and work uninterrupted for 30 to 45 minutes. Between blocks, we need a 5- or 10-minute rest to reset, and then we’re able to do another sprint. After two or three blocks, we need a longer break. One series of studies showed a range in the most productive durations with sprints ranging from 52 to 112 minutes with the accompanying rests of between 17 and 26 minutes. Working this way, in a series of sprints and rests, we get more done, with higher quality, and less stress.

But before you start hacking productivity like a tech bro and thinking that your goal should be eight (or eighteen) hours a day of uninterrupted, heads-down focused productivity, note that you’re probably built for at most four hours a day of this quality of work. Your brain doesn’t stay at peak performance for longer than that.

Another thing to understand about your brain is that different tasks require different brain processes. Task batching, that is grouping similar activities, reduces the cost of switching and decreases errors. When speed is the goal, put like with like. In contrast, to increase creativity or provide some mental relief, deliberately switch tasks to something with an entirely different vibe.

Armed with that understanding of the value of focus, let’s talk about what you can do to reduce your thoughtload by managing your attention.

Here’s what I’ve seen when it comes to your focal point: Focus on activity, become a busy person. Focus on outputs, become a productive person. Focus on outcomes, become an effective person.

Sure, being productive is better than being busy, but if your productivity isn’t leading to changes in your outcomes, what’s it worth? Being effective is what it’s all about. When you pay attention to being effective, you don’t need to be as productive because all those things you were churning out that weren’t making a dent aren’t required anymore. When you don’t need to be as productive, you can be less busy because fewer outputs mean fewer tasks. That’s the first step in managing your thoughtload—choosing your quest and aligning your attention to accomplish it.

Once it’s clear, find a way to keep your quest top of mind.

The work to confront how your environment and even your own delusions direct your attention to all the wrong things can be intense and excruciating. And it’s not lost on me that your boss, who is slagging you for not making more progress, is the person most likely to be swamping you with low-value activities. (If that’s the case, your boss needs this process as much as you do. Work through it together.) You have things to accomplish. Real things. Meaningful things. The better defined they are, the easier it is to see what’s essential versus what’s trivial and wasteful. When you do more of the former and less of the latter, your team will benefit and both you and your boss will get kudos.

* * *

Liane Davey has spent more than 25 years researching and advising teams on how to perform at their best. Known as the “teamwork doctor,” she works with teams from the frontlines to the boardroom, across industries and around the world, from Boston to Bangkok. Through her work with hundreds of teams, including 26 Global Fortune 500 companies (and counting), she has developed a practical, research-backed approach to solving the challenges that prevent teams from working effectively together. Her new book, Thoughtload: Manage the Madness and Free Your Team to Do Great Work, tackles today’s most pressing management challenges: over-burdened systems, burned-out teams, and plateauing results.
* * * Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
* * *