I thought it might be useful to explain a bit of the science behind why focus is important. And don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you that it’s because you get what you focus on – well, not exactly anyway.

The first issue comes from US Professor of Psychology and Management Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who concluded that we have available to us through our senses around 2 million ‘bits’ of information per second. The second, first posited byGeorge Miller in 1956, is that we can only process 7 plus or minus two ‘chunks’ of information (= c. 134 ‘bits’) at any given time. If we were simultaneously conscious of all the data coming at us, we’d go insane trying to process it all.

So, according to NLP studies, the 2m ‘bits’ are filtered by our subconscious, through three main mechanisms:

• Delete what’s not of immediate importance or relevance
• Distort what doesn’t fit our paradigm, until it does
• Generalise it into things that we can recognise

Why does that make focus important? Well, apart from keeping us sane (and stopping us trying to do too much at once, and not doing any of it as well as we could), focus is what determines which seven plus or minus two ‘chunks’ each second get into our awareness for conscious processing. What gets in is 7 ± 2 chunks that are relevant to what we’re focussing on – the rest simply passes us by.

So if you’re trying to make a go of half-a-dozen different business opportunities, on average the best you can hope for at any one time is that you’ll become aware of 1½ chunks of information that are relevant to each (assuming you’re operating at the ‘plus 2′ end of the scale; 7+2=9 / 6 opportunities = 1.5 each). Now let’s think about someone who’s working on just one opportunity – even if he can only handle 5 (7 minus 2) chunks – i.e. he’s operating at only just over half the level you are – he’s still getting over 3 times as much relevant information to make a success of that business as you are. And they do say, knowledge is power.

That’s without even starting to think about how your market perceives you if you’re coming to them with a different offer every time they see you, or how much time you’re wasting on sub-optimal opportunities. More on those later. For now, just focus on how much of the information that could be relevant to your bestbusiness opportunity is just passing you by, because you’re cluttering your mind with too many “opportunities”.

References:
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1990). ‘Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience’. New York: Harper and Row.
Miller, G. A. (1956). ‘The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information.’ Psychological Review, 63, 81-97

Originally posted on this website in May 2008

So, if I was looking at four opportunities, which full-time would create earnings of £30k, £50k, £60k and £70k, I,d allocate 14%, 24%, 29% and 33% of my time respectively. Assuming an average of 21 working days a month, that would be 3, 5, 6 and 7 days each month (see the table below). Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Of course, one thing that this method ignores is the longer-term potential – those opportunities that will create great wealth in a few years, but little right now. So I developed a more complex calculator that allows clients to decide what their time horizon is, and allocate their time accordingly, taking into account both short-term and longer term earnings.

You can download a free version at: http://www.opportunity-matrix.com/timeallocator.html

Taking the simple approach works quite well for a small number of opportunities, but if you have more things you’d like to work on, then the amounts of time allocated by this method can get impossibly small – I generally advise that if you can’t spend at least one day a week – 4 days a month – on something, then it won’t be getting enough of your attention to make a good go of it. So that means you need a way to decide which opportunities to focus on, and which to park – for now at least.

Multiple Criteria

For some years, I used a balanced scorecard, or multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM), approach to making this kind of choice. For this, you take all of the criteria by which you plan to rate each opportunity – it might be how easy it will be, how much time it will take, how exciting it is – and then apply a weighting to each, to indicate how important it is. Then you score each opportunity against the criteria, multiply the scores by the weights, and add them all up to arrive at a rating for each opportunity (see the example below for a clearer picture of how it works).

And then you select the two or three opportunities with the highest ratings, and apply the time allocation principle described earlier.

You can see that, despite the number of criteria we need to take into account, this method gives us a relatively simple way to compare the choices we have, by arriving at a single ‘Rating’ score at the end.

It was only when I used MCDM to help me decide on a new car that I realised that it was actually rather one-dimensional. Here’s the grid I completed:

Clearly the Skoda Octavia just didn’t match up to my requirements, and the Audi was the best choice for me.

There was just one problem: I really (I mean really) wanted to buy the Jaguar.

So that must mean there was a problem with either the criteria, or the scoring – right?

Multiple Dimensions

I noticed that the standard MCDM approach was mixing up criteria that appealed to my rational mind with those that appealed to my emotions – my passion. Splitting out the rational measures (economy, service cost, features) from those that were important for emotional reasons (power, acceleration, style) gave a completely different picture, represented on a graph here:

Click the image to open a larger version in a new window

By breaking out the two types of criteria, I could clearly see that my emotional preference for the Jaguar was off the scale, although the rational choice was for the Audi. So rather than messing about with the scores and the weightings, to try to get the Jaguar to come out on top, I could choose to make my decision based on either emotion or rationality – or a combination of both. But I would understand why I was doing it, rather than being frustrated by the results. In the event, I went for my passion, so I now drive a Jaguar.

This example highlighted for me the difficulty of comparing like with like when assessing opportunities. Some opportunities that come along are just more attractive than others, regardless of how practical, or viable, they are. So I now use an analysis tool that scores opportunities on two dimensions – attractiveness and viability. I use a scorecard approach for each dimension, but I’m very careful to avoid mixing the two, as they each play a different part in the likely success of a venture.

Successful Business

If an opportunity appeals to us, we are far more likely to make a go of it. We’ll put in the extra effort to overcome the obstacles that will be put in our way, and to find ways to make it work. So the attractiveness score will determine how much passion we’ll put into a venture – how much we want to do it.

But it’s no good being madly passionate about an opportunity if it just won’t work. Which is why I use the viability dimension as well. The sorts of things that will make a venture viable (or not) won’t inspire passion in most people – things like access to the market, availability of skills, adequate funds or cash-flow implications. But they are all things that have to be right if the venture is to succeed fully.

Click on the image to open a larger version in a new window

Having said that, you are more likely to make a go of an opportunity that scores high on the attractiveness dimension but has ‘challenges’ on viability than you are to succeed in a highly viable venture that just doesn’t light you up. Without the passion that comes from finding the opportunity attractive, even something that just shouldn’t fail can peter out into mediocrity at best. In my experience, businesses only really perform when they are being driven by people who are truly passionate about them.

With that in mind, I developed the Opportunity Matrix™ programmes to help entrepreneurs, businessmen and salespeople to decide which opportunities to concentrate on. The analysis tool, available from www.opportunity-matrix.com, is only the start of the programmes. My experience has been that people aren’t sufficiently detached from their opportunities to do an accurate job of scoring them against their criteria – on either dimension (attractiveness or viability) – or indeed of defining the criteria in the first place. So the programmes include up to 4 hours of being challenged by an experienced consultant, to justify your scores.

The outcome is a much more robust picture of which opportunities you need to be spending your time and resources on, so that you can concentrate on getting where you want to go.

In business, very few of our serious decisions are truly simple. Almost by definition, if it’s a serious decision, it will probably have implications beyond the immediate effect, and it will almost certainly affect more than just us. Most business decisions will affect a number of different stakeholders – from customers through to suppliers, staff and investors. And each of those will have their own set of criteria for selecting amongst alternatives.

The preferred option for investors may well be very different from what the staff would select. And suppliers would probably go for something different again. So how can we pick the right choice, taking into account the needs and wants of all the groups? And which group should be given the most importance?

Even if we ignore all the rest, and just select based on our own criteria, the chances are that even those will have clashes – is turnover more important than profit? Is innovation more important than market share? Is colour more important than quality even? How will we pick the choice that best matches all of the differing criteria?

So what is needed is a methodology that can measure each option against a number of criteria, and come up with a measure so that each option that can be simply compared and rated. It also needs to take into account the relative importance – to our business – of all of the criteria, whether ours or stakeholders’.

A common methodology is Multiple Criteria Decision Making, or MCDM. A list of criteria is developed, ideally by canvassing all the stakeholders, but it can equally be created by management. Each criterion is then weighted, according to how important it is in the overall picture, relative to all the rest. Then each option is scored against each of the criteria, according to how well it satisfies it. Finally, the scores are multiplied by the weightings and the results for each option are added up, to give a rating for that option. The table below should make the process clearer.

The advantage of MCDM is that it gives a balanced view of how suitable any option is, and helps to take emotion out of the equation. It also stops any one factor from overshadowing others. One of its disadvantages is that it is possible for a critical criterion to be obscured in the overall score. Other problems include that a simple multiplication of the score times the weighting may be too simple a calculation, and that putting all of the criteria together fails to differentiate between logical, objective measurements and emotional, subjective judgements.

Overall, though MCDM may be a bit of a blunt instrument for truly complex decisions, it is much better than making serious decisions on gut feel alone.