When Focus Is the Real Issue
by Jonathan Simmons, Founder
The Reality: You're Doing Too Much
Your team isn't failing because they're not working hard enough. They're failing because they're working on too many things at once.
There are five "top priorities." Three "urgent initiatives." A dozen "quick wins" that have been in progress for months. And every week, something new gets added to the list without anything coming off.
This isn't ambition. It's a focus problem.
What Lack of Focus Looks Like
Talented people spinning their wheels. Your best engineers are context-switching between four different projects. None of them are moving quickly. All of them are frustrated. They know they could do great work—if only they could focus on one thing long enough to actually finish it.
Opportunities missed. That market window you had six months ago? Gone. Your competitor shipped while you were stuck deciding between three half-baked initiatives. By the time you finally ship, the opportunity has passed.
Death by a thousand cuts. Every project is slightly under-resourced. Every initiative is slightly behind schedule. Every team is slightly burned out. And collectively, you're accomplishing far less than you should be.
The cost isn't just productivity. It's potential.
Why Focus Breaks Down
Most organizations don't lose focus intentionally. It happens gradually:
Everything seems important
When you're a startup, everything is important. You need sales, marketing, product, recruiting, fundraising—all at once. But at some point, trying to do everything means you do nothing well.
Leadership can't say no
Every stakeholder has a compelling case for why their thing should be prioritized. Every opportunity looks promising. Every risk feels urgent. So instead of choosing, leadership tries to do it all.
There's no forcing function
Without a clear framework for prioritization, decisions get made politically, emotionally, or by whoever yells loudest. And once something is in flight, it's hard to kill—even when it's clearly not working.
Short-term thinking dominates
"We'll just knock this out really quick" becomes six weeks of distraction. The urgent crowds out the important. And the strategic work that would actually move the needle never gets done.
The Hidden Cost of Lost Focus
The math is brutal: If your team is split across five priorities, you're not moving five things forward at 20% speed. You're moving them at 5% speed, because of context switching, coordination overhead, and cognitive load.
But the real cost is opportunity cost:
- Momentum dies. When nothing ever ships, teams lose confidence. Morale drops. Talented people leave.
- Competitive advantage erodes. While you're spread thin, competitors with focus are shipping, iterating, and winning.
- Strategic bets never pay off. The transformative work that would change your trajectory? It never gets the sustained attention it needs to succeed.
You can't out-execute a focus problem. You have to out-prioritize it.
What Focus Looks Like in Practice
When you have focus, it's obvious:
- Everyone knows the top priority. If you ask ten people "what's most important right now?" you get the same answer from all ten.
- Resources are concentrated. Instead of spreading people thin, you stack teams on the most important problems.
- Things ship. Not someday. Not eventually. This month. This quarter. Because you're not distracted by twelve other things.
- Saying no is normal. Good ideas get deferred. Opportunities get passed up. Not because they're bad, but because they're not the most important thing right now.
Focus doesn't mean doing less work. It means doing less at once so you can do more over time.
How to Regain Focus
If you've lost focus, here's how to get it back:
1. Run a priority audit
List everything your team is working on. Be honest about what's actually getting attention. Then force-rank them. Not "top 5." Rank every single thing from 1 to N.
2. Kill or defer ruthlessly
Anything below your top 3 priorities needs to be killed, paused, or explicitly deferred. This will be painful. Do it anyway.
3. Protect focus institutionally
Create rules that prevent new work from sneaking in. "No new projects until X ships." "All requests go through the prioritization framework." "Top priority always has first claim on resources."
4. Communicate relentlessly
Say no publicly and clearly. Explain why. Redirect energy toward the things that matter. Over-communicate the priority so nobody has to guess.
5. Measure progress, not activity
Track what ships, not what's in progress. Celebrate finishing things, not starting things. Make momentum visible.
The Hardest Part
The hardest part of focus isn't the execution. It's the decision.
Choosing what to focus on means explicitly choosing what not to focus on. It means disappointing stakeholders. It means saying no to good ideas. It means accepting that you can't do everything.
But here's the truth: you're already not doing everything. You're just pretending you are, which means you're doing everything badly instead of a few things exceptionally well.
When to Get Help
If you're struggling to prioritize, it's often because you're too close to the problem. Every stakeholder feels like the most important one. Every opportunity feels too good to pass up. Every risk feels existential.
This is where an outside perspective helps. We parachute into situations like this, audit what's actually happening, and help leadership make the hard calls.
Not by telling you what to do—but by giving you frameworks, asking the right questions, and holding you accountable to the decisions you make.
Because focus isn't a one-time decision. It's a discipline. And if you don't protect it, entropy will steal it from you one "quick win" at a time.
The bottom line: You can't do everything. But you can do the most important thing exceptionally well. That's what focus gives you. And it's the difference between potential and results.