Improve Organizational Focus

Read Time: 4 Minutes

Every day your brain process 70,000 thoughts, ideas, and decisions.

Plenty of opportunities for distraction.

When you multiply this by the number of people in your organization, the potential to stay focused and aligned on the same page dwindles.

Today, we’re discussing about 5 strategies to deepen organizational focus to increase alignment on team-wide priorities.

Team Agreements are shared decisions that everyone in your company aligns with.

Sometimes these are centralized in an Employe Handbook, documented in a culture sheet, or memorialized via company values, etc..,

These agreements become the foundation for how the organization operates.

A section of this document can be dedicated to a basic set of principles through which you manifest Deep Organizational Focus. Some of the principles we list in the following sections

What’s key is having a document that everyone is committed to upholding.

Sounds cult-ish?

Maybe, AND its how you can get a team of multiple people from different backgrounds on the same page.

It wouldn’t hurt to integrate performance-based bonuses so that people “get” why staying focused is important.

I once heard that your to-do list should never increase past 5 things.

Every author, speaker, and podcaster has their own version of this expression.

In my opinion, having a long to-do list will paralyze you before even getting started.

On Sundays, I always review my to-do list for the upcoming week and ensure there aren’t more than 4 items per day.

If there are, I wonder what can be automated or delegated to my team.

I invite them to propose solutions.

I also invite them to do the same exercise so we all can feel in flow throughout the week.

I use DND wherever possible.

In Slack, on my iPhone, on Discord and on my computer.

I use pomodoro timers to work for 40-minute sprints. The tool I use OffScreen, also blocks the apps on my phone so even if my anxious mind wants to check the apps, they are locked.

Ensure to create Do Not Disturb standards in the Team Agreements so people know how to really reach you if there is an emergency (i.e. 2 phone calls)

Otherwise, key people (i.e. your team) may feel ignored.

Oh, and emails can be checked once or twice a day, not once or twice an hour.

Most meetings suck, and are expensive

You spend half the time catching up or sharing updates about a proect.

This is not useful when you have limited creative energy.

Project updates can be input on your Project Management dashboards to give the Head of Operations or CEO and update on where everything is at

If you do want to meet weekly as a team, you can have all of these updates submitted ahead of time and use the time to productively discuss Issues/Project Blocks.

In terms of team-building, there are other vehicles that can be designed for that (weekly happy hour, monthly offsite event, individual 1:1s)

Minimizing meetings will create new levels of performance.

The last one is fun

Deep Work is an ongoing experiment.

It might be difficult to implement everything we discussed above all at once.

Team Agreements don’t have to equal Company-Wide Agreements.

Agreements can be tailored to the team to create the intended results.

And, the evolving experiments can lead to interesting conversations between teams.

We’ve created a template here for you to Duplicate if you wish to use Team Agreements. You can duplicate this as many times as possible and customize them for each team.

What are your Team Agreements?