Multitasking sounds productive and feels busy, but it means everything gets half of your brain. Focus is a money skill: the quality of what you produce in one locked in hour beats a scattered day.
The deep work block
- Pick one task and one finish line before you sit down.
- Phone in another room, notifications off, door closed if you can.
- Set a timer for 60 to 90 minutes. Work until it rings, no exceptions.
- Take a real break, then decide: another block or done for the day.
Two deep work blocks a day will outproduce most people's entire week. It is not about more hours. It is about hours that actually count.
This is why the Momentum Planner daily page starts with your Top 3 goals and a focused work session: the plan protects the block before the day can steal it.
Case study
Case study: Aytekin Tank, JotForm
In our own words. Original story linked below.
- Who
- Aytekin Tank, founder and CEO of JotForm, an online form builder.
- Starting point
- Tank describes bootstrapping JotForm over 13 years at the time of the article, building one evolving product rather than chasing side projects. The company is presented as serving five million users at that time. That user number is dated to the article, not a current claim.
- First moves
- Narrowed work to the smallest useful version of a task, then gathered feedback and refined it.
- Used timeboxing, including 25 minute focused sprints followed by five minute breaks, with notifications off and interruptions blocked.
- Automated a recurring system problem: instead of staff fixing server issues overnight, the team set up alerts tied to capacity thresholds so problems were caught before a crisis point.
- What worked
- Staying on one product and one priority at a time kept the whole team pointed in the same direction. Time boundaries and automation freed attention for the work that actually moved the business, rather than letting urgent fixes and distractions fill the day.
- What to copy
- Pick one core offer or project. Define the smallest version that can still produce a result. Put a time box around deep work, silence notifications, and automate one repeatable fire drill instead of heroically fighting the same fire again.
- Watch out
- Single focus does not mean never testing ideas. Tank still allows sampling and experimenting, but the main work stays narrow. Also, do not copy the five million user figure as a promise. That was JotForm after years of work, so it is an outlier outcome, not a typical result for a new founder.
- Source
- Entrepreneur.com, Why Entrepreneurs Need to Do One Thing at a Time
Takeaway: Phone down, one task, timer on. Focus is a money skill.