Focus

We've all seen them: those productivity YouTubers with perfectly lit home offices explaining how they maintain "deep work" for 12+ hours a day. They sit there, looking impossibly serene, selling us a vision of superhuman concentration that I've come to believe is complete nonsense.

I used to buy into this. I'd feel like a failure when my brain checked out after three solid hours of work. I'd push myself to match these claimed productivity marathons, only to end up exhausted and wondering what was wrong with me.

Here's what I've figured out through trial and error: our brains just don't work that way. At least mine doesn't. I've found I can do maybe 4-5 hours of genuine deep focus daily, broken into chunks. Beyond that, I'm still mentally effective, but in different ways – more suited to collaboration, communication, and less intensive tasks rather than deep work.

This insight has changed how I structure my day. Those morning hours of deep focus are sacred – they're when I tackle the most complex problems. This aligns with what Jeff Bezos famously calls his "high IQ meeting" approach. Bezos schedules his most mentally demanding meetings at 10 a.m., noting that by late afternoon, he's simply not at his cognitive best for challenging problems. As he puts it, "By 5 p.m., I'm like, 'I can't think about that today. Let's try this again tomorrow at 10 a.m.'"

Those few hours of real focus, when used well, are worth far more than double the time spent in a semi-distracted state. I've noticed this in my teammates too – the most valuable contributors aren't the ones logging 12-hour days. They're the ones who bring their full attention to the right problems for shorter, more intense periods.

The Hardware Trap

I've fallen for every productivity hardware upgrade imaginable. Ultrawide curved monitors. Triple-screen setups. Higher resolutions to fit more windows. Each promising to transform me into some multitasking wizard.

What I actually bought wasn't productivity – it was distraction disguised as efficiency. Each extra screen became another venue for notifications, another space to fill with Slack, email, and other attention-fracturing tools.

In 2025, I've gone the opposite direction: smaller. My main work setup now has just enough screen space for one or two applications. Not because I can't afford bigger – but because the constraint forces me to choose what deserves my attention right now.

This limitation has oddly become my best focus tool. When I can only comfortably see one document or conversation at a time, I'm present with it. The hardware limitation became a feature, not a bug.

The AI Partnership

The other half of my focus shift has been outsourcing the busywork. Where I once tried to juggle multiple applications, I now delegate aggressively to AI tools that handle the administrative stuff that used to scatter my attention.

My email gets filtered before I see it. Meeting notes get summarised. Research gets compiled. First drafts get generated. This isn't about replacing thinking – it's about eliminating the low-value tasks that constantly pulled me out of flow.

The result? When I focus, I actually focus. I'm not half-writing an email while half-listening to a call. I'm fully engaged with the complex work that needs my human judgment.

This approach – smaller screens plus AI delegation – has completely changed what focus means for me. It's no longer about willpower or duration. It's about creating conditions where concentration happens naturally.

I'm not perfect at this. I still get pulled into the multitasking trap. And let's be honest – many company metrics still force us into equating hours with productivity. These legacy measurements are changing rapidly, but they still influence how we work and how we're evaluated.

Despite this, I'm convinced that genuine focus isn't an endurance sport. It's not about who can stare at code the longest without blinking.

It's about creating space – physical, digital, and mental – where your best thinking can happen. And sometimes that means working less, but working better.

The Privacy Paradox

There's an irony to my current digital life that I've been thinking about lately. In my last post about privacy, I wrote about my journey to reclaim control over my data – moving away from surveillance-as-a-service platforms to more secure, private alternatives.

Yet here I am, advocating for deeper integration with AI tools that, by their very nature, require access to virtually everything I think and do. I'm simultaneously pulling back from data-hungry ecosystems while whispering my every thought to at least one AI throughout my day.

It's a strange contradiction. On one hand, I'm meticulously auditing which services can access my photos, notes, and location. On the other, I'm willingly feeding my draft emails, meeting notes, and half-formed ideas into systems far more pervasive than anything that came before.

Perhaps this tension – between protecting our digital boundaries while embracing tools that blur them – is the defining challenge of 2025. We're figuring out which information belongs where, which systems deserve our trust, and where to draw the lines.