Is Focus Necessary for Female Business Owners?

Why is there such a focus on… well… focus? After all, there’s so much to potentially take care of for women who run businesses. Isn’t it better to work on multiple things at one time, or switch between tasks as they come up? If you’re just doing one thing at a time, does that even count? How else are you supposed to get everything done?

There’s always more work to be done, at least in theory. One more social media post, one more email, etc. But that doesn’t mean your life will be better if you just keep working. Au contraire!

US culture rewards busyness and so-called multitasking

I give a history of why managers became so focused on making sure people look like they’re working in my book, The Rebel’s Guide to Getting $hit Done. In a nutshell, unlike in a factory where it’s easy to see if someone’s producing the number of widgets every hour that they’re supposed to, it’s sometimes hard to measure a knowledge worker’s performance. 

The result is that management often defaults to what they can see, which is how long the worker has been in their seat or typing at the keyboard or whatever. Over time, this has come to mean that a good worker puts in a solid eight hours, and a hard worker puts in more. Also, that everyone needs to come back to the office and end remote work.

However, this ignores the results the worker is getting. If the worker can achieve their daily goals in six hours instead of eight, they shouldn’t have to sit there and look busy for an additional two hours (or more, if they want a promotion.) That’s time they could be spending recharging their brains. 

Now that companies have assimilated the belief in metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), it’s become popular to ignore or downplay aspects of business that can’t be measured. Time you spend thinking can’t be quantified, and very often the results of a serious bout of thinking don’t come to pass right away. 

But the time you spend on a spreadsheet can be quantified; the number of sales calls you make is quantified, and the number of social media posts you create and post are all quantifiable. The assumption is that when you’re doing these things, you’re obviously working. 

If someone is not obviously working – if they’re not typing, on a client or prospect call, etc. – then most Americans would think they’re not working. Not only that, most Americans will think they’re being lazy. It doesn’t matter whether the work being done will have any impact on any aspect of the business whatsoever; what counts is the appearance of work (which is why I say it’s performative.) 

In reality there’s a huge difference between just doing “stuff” (calling people, answering emails, working on spreadsheets) and performing activities that will actually move the business forward. But sometimes those tasks that make the business thrive and prosper look like you’re not doing anything at all. 

To be clear, I’m not saying that KPIs are bad, or that you should never use spreadsheets or metrics, or never answer calls and emails. What I am saying is that modern culture puts no emphasis on focus or paying attention, and in fact often rewards people who are “performing” working rather than those who are actually working. Especially when that work involves thinking.

I don’t have to go on about how American culture downplays thinking, right? All you have to do is look at who’s in the Oval Office right now in 2025. And who that person has surrounded himself with: not a single person who’s qualified to do the job they’re doing. 

And hopefully I also don’t have to go on about how important thinking is to an entrepreneur. If you can’t think, you can’t make decisions or plan or strategize. 

Why focus is the piece you’re missing in your business

The old adage is that work expands to fill the available time. If you give yourself more hours to do the work, you’ll spend more time faffing around just because you can. That’s why the four-day work week experiments have been so popular: there’s no loss in productivity because everyone knows they need to get stuff done in four days.

Once I was on a group coaching call, and the coach recommended that one of the business owners deliberately spend less time in her business (she was working ten hours a day most days.) A week later she said that she’d reduced her hours, but didn’t feel that her workload had shifted at all. 

It turned out that what she was missing was the focused attention on her work. Once you remove distractions, stop working on meaningless tasks and start delegating the ones that your team members could and should do, you need less time for your tasks. When you bring your full attention to prioritized tasks, working on them one by one, you get a ton of work accomplished.

That’s because when you bring your full attention to the work, you can complete it faster. You can figure out how to attack it more effectively, and then you can actually do it in a short amount of time. You have a lot of brain power - all humans do - but when you’re fully enveloped in what you’re doing, then you get to use all that brain power.

It’s like the sun and a magnifying glass. The sun will just spread its rays all over the place. Suppose you want to start a campfire (in a place that won’t cause a wildfire, please.) When the sun’s rays are scattered among the twigs, nothing happens. But if you use a magnifying glass to aim the sun’s rays at a particular twig for long enough, it will start to burn. 

Similarly, a laser won’t do anything if the light is diffused over the surface. But when you concentrate it in one spot, it can cut through human tissue in a surgery. 

When you allow distractions, you’re diffusing your light. If you don’t set aside time to allow your brain to focus this way, you won’t be able to aim your attention long enough for it to cut through your problem like a laser. Then you’ll need more time to complete the project.

Setting aside time dedicated to this kind of work and blocking anything that would distract you allows you to concentrate your energy on the (one) thing you’re working on.

Lasers don’t get tired, and neither does the sun. Human brains do, though. After some intense concentration, your brain needs some rest before it gets back into that mode again. Rest doesn’t necessarily mean a nap, though it could. Rest can also be a quick walk, a chat with a loved one, or something like that: you’re using different parts of your brain which allows your “thinky” aspect to rest.

Two problems with focus as a business owner

You need time set aside without distractions to be able to bring your full attention to a task. The entrepreneurs I know typically have a problem with setting aside the time, or problems with distractions, or both.

Setting aside time for concentrated, difficult thinky work is simple, but not always easy. It requires you to block the time off on your calendar, and treat that time as you would your best client. That means your thinky session doesn’t get pushed into random corners of your calendar to make way for another client or meeting. It’s the big rock around which other meetings are scheduled, so that you’re the one in control of your time.

Distractions are focus killers. You’ve probably heard that it can take 23 minutes to get back to where you started when you're interrupted. But that doesn’t even mean that you answer an email or a question that someone pokes their head into your office to ask. The mere notification will disrupt you enough: a ping from your phone, the email pop up you see out of the corner of your eye, the knock at the door.

That means boundaries around these blocks of time. Guard them like a pit bull will guard its person. Turn off all notifications when you go into your focus zone, if you can’t stand to have them off all the time. If you have kept this as a regular time, then people will learn that during this time you can’t be interrupted and they won’t come knocking on your door. You have to make it very clear to everyone that short of a bona fide emergency, you are not to be interrupted.

This might seem scary because we’re all so used to being available all the time. But Gen X and older generations started work at a time when there was no email and pretty much anyone in a position of power had an assistant to answer their phone. If your boss was in a meeting for two hours, you did not have access to them at all. (And they didn’t have access to you either.) 

You had to either figure your problem out, or wait for the meeting to end and the boss to come out of the bathroom to ask your question. It’s OK for people to try to figure things out on their own while you, the boss, are in your meeting (with yourself, to work on the business.)

Although you will get more done if you always turn off your notifications, turning them off isn’t as necessary for some other kinds of work. If you’re reading and answering emails, for example, the email notification isn’t going to really interrupt you that much. If you’re doing some administrative work, an email notification could be a welcome break, at least if you hate administrative stuff as much as I do. Though you might want to turn off notifications anyway so you can plow through them at top speed to get them out of your way if there’s no one else to take care of them for you.

Recap (tl;dr):

For business owners who want to achieve goals in their business, having some time on a regular basis to focus on their business without interruptions is an absolute must. Even though American culture rewards the appearance of working rather than the work itself, your own business needs you to accomplish the priorities.

Having trouble deciding what the priorities are, or getting focus time to stick? Let’s talk - click here to schedule your free consultation.

Photo by Marten Newhall on Unsplash.