You aren’t losing your focus because you’re lazy. You’re losing it because you’re overloaded, and most of us deal with that overload in the worst possible way: by trying to do everything at once.
I see this pattern almost every day. Smart, capable leaders who would never describe themselves as scattered are running from email to meeting to Slack to email, half-listening on every call and scrolling through their phones while their kids are telling them about school. The leadership focus they imagine they have is leaking out of a hundred small holes, and they don’t even notice it happening.
They feel busy, productive, and important, but they’re none of those things.
A few weeks ago, I was working with a leader, whom we’ll call Mark, to protect his identity. He told me with a kind of resigned pride that he had become a master multitasker. Email during meetings, Slack during one-on-ones, phone face-up on his desk so he could glance at it whenever something pinged. He thought of it as efficiency, proof that he was getting more done. He also told me he was tired in a way that sleep wasn’t fixing anymore.
When I asked him to describe his last conversation with his head of product, he couldn’t. He remembered roughly what they had agreed to, but he couldn’t tell me how she sounded, what she was worried about, or whether she had said anything important he had missed.
That’s the cost.
It isn’t that the email got answered or the Slack got skimmed. It’s that he wasn’t actually present for any of it. He was in three rooms at once and not really in any of them.
What divided attention does to leadership focus
Researchers at Stanford led by Clifford Nass ran a now-famous study on heavy media multitaskers, the people who toggle constantly between email, Slack, browser tabs, and phone notifications. The result was counterintuitive. The people who multitask the most are actually the worst at it. They are slower to switch between tasks and more easily distracted by irrelevant information than people who multitask less. The habit is degrading their attention rather than sharpening it.
Task switching makes us slower, more error-prone, and worse at the one thing leadership requires more than any other: paying attention to the people in front of us. Multitasking isn’t a productivity strategy. It’s a coping strategy for being overloaded, and like most coping strategies, it makes the underlying problem worse.
The leaders who really break out of this pattern don’t try to optimize their multitasking. They stop, regain their focus, and direct their attention to one thing at a time.
Here’s the subtle shift:
Stop . Start directing it.
When you treat your attention as a single resource that goes to one place at a time, the people around you feel it almost immediately. You think more clearly because you are not constantly switching. People feel heard the first time they say something, and the constant low-grade exhaustion of trying to track ten things at once starts to lift.
Next time you walk into a meeting, close the laptop. Put the phone screen down where you actually can’t see it light up, because silent isn’t enough. Close every browser tab that isn’t part of the thinking you’re doing. And when you’re with the people you love, let the work wait. It will still be there in an hour.
Attention is the most valuable resource you have as a leader, yet almost nobody treats it that way. Stop dividing it. Start directing it. That is where the work actually begins.
If this resonates, the book goes deeper. Subtle Shifts is built around exactly this kind of small redirection, the kind that doesn’t look like much from the outside but reshapes a leader’s life over time.
