What do pea coats have to do with productivity? We’ll get to that later. But first…

Focus.

Almost every successful person I speak to says that focus is one of the key ingredients to their success, not only the entrepreneurial domain but almost any domain you could care to mention.

As Warren Buffett put it, “the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”

And I agree, wholeheartedly.

In the past three years I have:

• Founded my consultancy Collective Campus and built it up to become a seven-figure business, recognised by the Australian Financial Review their 2018 Fast Starters List as one of Australia’s fastest growing new companies.
• Founded Lemonade Stand, a children’s entrepreneurship program that has been rolled out to over 1,000 children across four cities and two countries and has, as of writing, been turned into an online platform that’s being piloted by a private school
• Self-published two books and got a book deal with Wiley for my third effort called Employee to Entrepreneur, written earlier this year and set to hit bookshelves globally in Januar
• Founded and hosted almost 300 episodes of the Future Squared podcast, which has given me access to awesome conversation with awesome names such as Adam Grant, Kevin Kelly, Jason Fried, Gretchen Rubin and many, many more
• Our team also co-founded Konkrete, a blockchain-enabled share registry that has just raised over $2M

Despite all of this, I still maintain a pretty active social life, travel often and rarely work past 5pm. In fact, recently our team started experimenting with a 9 to 3 workday!

I was asked how I reconcile the focus doctrine with all of the various projects I’m working on by Ryan Helms, host of the Hustle to Freedom podcast. I hadn’t thought about it at length at the time, so I said that it depends on what your goals are, something I elude to later in this post, but the question got me thinking, and the answer is simple.

Focus is in fact, somewhat counterintuitively perhaps, the reason for whatever success I’ve had running multiple projects at the same time.

A Common Misconception

It’s a common misconception that focus means working on a single project, and that working on a single project immediately renders you more focused than somebody who is working on four. But here’s why that’s flawed thinking.

Introducing the Version 1 Founder and Version 2 Founder

Version 1 Founder

I am a founder of a company overseeing a team of ten and I’m dedicating all of my time to one single project.

I spend my time:

• over-thinking decisions
• attending as many long meetings as possible so I can be across everything I don’t need to be across
• scheduling one-hour meetings by default
• constantly checking and responding to email
• flying across the country for conversations that could have taken place on the phone
• saying ‘yes’ to most things and accepting all sorts of non-consequential invitations
• not prioritising decisions effectively
• ignoring those automation and outsourcing tools everyone is talking about because they’re too hard to configure
• multi-tasking so I’m constantly switching between tasks
• responding to more notification dings than Pavlov’s dog
• preparing elaborate Powerpoint proposals for prospects I haven’t qualified properly when a simple email would do

I might be busy but how much do you think I am actually going to get done?

Version 2 Founder (upgraded!)

I am also a founder of company overseeing a team of ten, but I’ve got several projects on the go. I also host a podcast, write books, blog regularly, deliver keynote talks, sit on several startup boards and even have a side hustle.

I spend my time:

• making reversible decisions quickly
• prioritising tasks so that I focus on high value tasks that are tied to both my strengths and the goals of the organisation
• outsourcing and automating everything else like a boss (er, I am the boss)
• meeting only warm prospects that have been qualified by an assistant
• not meeting people when a simple email or Slack message would do
• saying ‘no’ to most things
• checking email twice a day and responding in batches to mission critical items only
• focus on doing one task at a time
• getting into ‘the flow state’ for as much and for as long as possible — usually four hours is enough to get lots of high quality work done
• not responding to notifications, because I’ve turned them all off!

Obviously, I’m going to get way more actual value-adding work done.

It’s by being a Version 2 founder that I am capable of leading two ventures that you would classify as successful in addition to hosting a podcast, blogging and writing books for a reputable publisher.

And now, I want to give you my framework — which in actuality, is just a visual-inspired, memorable acronym I put together to capture all of the different things I do to become 10X more productive and effective than the average founder — and by the average founder who raises $10M in venture capital and proceeds to blow it all in under 18 months by focusing on doing all of the wrong things and spending it in all of the wrong places.

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