Photo Credit: Gamma Man

Running a company is like playing Tetris. You watch those twisted bricks fall on your head and you’re desperately trying to make sense out of them.

UXPin is growing (customers, revenue, team, caused headache…) and requires more drastically focused attention than ever. Believe me or not, staying focused is all about setting limits. You want to have beautiful garden - focus on one square meter at the time and make those little plants shine in the sun. You want to have beautiful company - limit your focus to the most important things and distribute the rest.

Paradoxically enough staying focused in a startup environment works exactly like human attention. D.E. Broadbent (in a little bit non-elegant way polished later by Anne Treisman) noticed that our attention mechanism filters and limits signals that are reaching our brain. Our attention is constantly trying to pick up most important things and give them speed through our busy neurons.

Photo: D.E. Broadbent

Nature apparently likes things to stay limited in order to be efficient.

I get 10-40 e-mails per day that I need to reply to (spam not included). Let say I’m spending 5 minutes on each e-mail on average (I sense in reality it might be even more). It means that on a good day I need to spend at least 50 minutes replying to e-mails, on a bad day almost 3.5 hour. Ouch.

Now imagine (or remind yourself as I bet you go through the same crap) that every hour somebody calls you for “a quick 10 minutes talk”. Bang bang and you get additional 35 minutes in your 3.5 hour e-mail workflow. It doesn’t sound that bad? Think about stuff that you’re doing after each call. You’re probably going to make yourself a tea, you’re thinking about things that you’ve just heard and you’re trying to remember what you were doing before the call. You’ll need at least 15 minutes to get back to focus. Crap, that’s another 45 minutes. So now your e-mail workflow will take you almost 5 hours. Do you see where I’m going? If you take calls during your work everything will take you at least 40% more time.

I’ve learnt how to deal with large amount of e-mails. Inbox 0 philosophy (all e-mails taken care of in 24 hours max), Mailbox on iPhone, Mail App on Macbook, super focused, efficient, workflow. But I’ve never learnt how to deal with calls.

Phone calls are efficiency destroyers. Dynamic, unpredictable, communication channel that takes you away from your job, devastates your focus and doesn’t give you any chance to think about the way you should go with the conversation. That’s like a headshot from behind. Bloody surprise.

Photo Credit: Furryscaly

Now, the big question is how to set yourself free, limit calls and re-focus? Easy!

Whenever you’re busy set your smartphone to “do not disturb” mode (available in iOS, some versions of Android [there’re also apps for the task). All your calls will be automatically canceled, you won’t get any text message notifications etc. Set yourself a voicemail message that will clearly state that you’re busy and if it’s important “please send me an e-mail”. If you’re expecting somebody to call you, or have people that might call you in an emergency - add their numbers to the favorite list (at least this is how it works on iOS) and set the “do not disturb” mode to “allow calls from favorites”.

This little tactic saved me quite a lot of time and headache.

Marcin

ps. If you want to save some time while working on a new design of your website, mobile app, or Google Glass app - you know what to do: use UXPin - the UX Design App.