[80/20] The cost of your distraction is exponential

Hey 🙂

The more successful you become as a CEO, the more your calendar slowly turns from a maker’s schedule into a manager’s schedule. More meetings. More people who need five minutes of your time. More things that feel urgent. And almost none of it chosen deliberately — it just accumulates.

And the cost of that isn’t yours to carry alone. When a CEO has no ‘white space’ left in the calendar, the whole business pays for it. Less strategic thinking happens. Less clarity gets through to the team. People start pulling in slightly different directions because nobody’s had the time to make sure everyone’s aligned. The cost of your distraction is exponential — it compounds across the size of your team.

There’s also an unwritten rule in most organisations, CEOs included, that to be valuable you need to be available. Always reachable, always responsive. I fundamentally disagree with that. The enemy of your best thinking, your company’s future, and your ability to lead well, is that ‘always on’ culture.

Here’s the thing though: we can’t control other people. We can only control ourselves. And as the CEO, how you control yourself sets the tone for everyone else. And there’s a lot you can do about it.

This is the exercise I run with founders and leadership teams. It’s not about eliminating distractions — that’s not realistic, especially at your level. It’s about controlling them. Planning for them. Getting ahead of them so they stop running your day, and by extension, running your business.

Step 1: Get clear on the job only you can do

Start with this question: what’s the job that ONLY you can do for the business?

For most CEOs, when you strip it right back, that job is protecting the future of the company. That could show up as a dozen different things depending on what’s going on in the business — the big strategic decision, the key relationship, the hard decision nobody else can make — but it’s always some version of the same thing: making sure the company is still standing, and still winning, three years from now.

Here’s the catch. You’re human, same as everyone else. You can’t do all of that at once. You want to be working on the single most important problem in the business right now — not the loudest one, not the most recent one, the most important one.

If you don’t protect white space for that, you’ll get run ragged by everything else. So once you know what that most important problem is, ask yourself four more questions:

As a percentage of your week, how much time are you actually getting to spend on the work ONLY you can do? What’s the cost to the business of not having more time for this work?
Of that time, how much of it is genuinely undistracted, strategic thinking time? What’s the cost of not having that either?
In an ideal world, what percentage of your week would you need to spend on this to actually make a difference?
And finally: what are the top three things that get in the way (distractions)?

Step 2: Apply the 80/20 to your calendar

A lot of people, once they’ve done step one, will tell me they need half their working week for their most important work. The truth is, you almost never need that much. What you need is a realistic constraint — and that’s where the 80/20 principle comes in.

The 80/20 principle teaches us that 80% of the value you bring comes from just 20% of the work you do.

For a CEO, that principle isn’t just personally true, it’s exponentially true. Your 20% doesn’t just produce 80% of your value — it produces your team’s clarity, direction, and alignment too. When you’re not thinking, your team isn’t aligned. When you’re not aligned, execution drifts. The cost of a distracted CEO isn’t one person’s lost productivity, it’s the whole company slightly off course.

At the CEO level, we want thought to drive action, not action to drive thought. Reacting to what’s loudest, busiest, and most urgent all day is action driving thought — you end up making decisions on the fly, without the thinking behind them. Protecting that 20% is what lets thought drive action instead — where the decisions your team executes on have actually been thought through, not just reacted to.

Take a standard working week. Roughly 20% of it — call it a day a week, or eight hours spread across five days — is what I call your 20% time. This might look like a 90-minute block every morning, or a couple of three-hour sessions and a shorter one somewhere else. It depends on the shape of your week.

The important part is that you plan it. This is day architecture — deciding in advance when your deep work happens, and putting it in the calendar as a permanent fixture, not a hope.

Most people already know when they’re at their best. For me, it’s mornings. So mornings are for the deep, creative, important work, and afternoons are for meetings and the more reactive stuff. That’s what works for me — yours might look different.

If you’re someone who looks at their calendar and thinks “I can barely find an hour a week for this,” start with the hour. Take what you can get. Then look a few weeks ahead — calendars tend to loosen up over time — and start claiming that time before anyone else does. Getting ahead of your calendar is part of the work.

Step 3: Get ahead of your distractions

Back to those top three distractions you identified in step one. Now we plan for them.

Take your inbox — email, Slack, Teams, whatever it is. If you leave it open all day, you’re training everyone around you to expect an instant reply, and you’re training yourself into a permanent state of shallow, reactive work. Add task-switching on top of that, and it’s no wonder people finish the day exhausted and somehow still unsatisfied with what they actually produced.

The fix is two things in your calendar: an inbound triage, and a shutdown routine.

Inbound triage

A set time — maybe a few times a day — where you open everything up: email, Slack, your project management tool, whatever’s coming at you. You deal with what takes a minute or two immediately. Anything longer becomes a to-do for later. You’re aiming to get through it in fifteen minutes or less most of the time. Then you close it all down again and go back to your real work.

This isn’t inbox zero in the way people usually mean it — zero unread messages, everything dealt with. For me, inbox zero means the least amount of time possible spent in there. That’s a different goal entirely.

One tip that changes things fast: if you don’t want an instant reply, don’t send a message instantly. Nearly every messaging platform has a send-later function. Reply during your morning triage, but schedule it for midday, and you might have your answer waiting by your afternoon triage. You’re not ignoring people — you’re just refusing to let their timing dictate yours.

Shutdown routine

This goes at the end of the day. Fifteen minutes, same time, every day. Reflect on what happened, catch anything you missed, check tomorrow’s calendar for gaps or clashes, and then close the laptop lid. You leave knowing the day is actually finished, not just abandoned.

The whole point of planning your distractions in like this: if it’s planned, it’s not a distraction anymore.

Why this matters more than it sounds

I first properly figured this out working in a busy agency, where the culture of urgency was baked into everything. There was this unspoken expectation that you should always be available, always reachable, always “on.” I never signed up for that. My view was simple: being a team player starts with doing my most valuable work. That’s my most important contribution. I can’t do that if I’m being interrupted every ten minutes.

So I started controlling my calendar. Setting the conditions for my best work to actually happen. And yes, occasionally people were frustrated by it. However, what they did notice, pretty quickly, was the output. Not just more volume. Better quality. And that’s really the whole game: quality over quantity, and more often than not, you end up with a healthy amount of both.

Your calendar is also your culture

How you work becomes how your company works. If you’re constantly available, constantly reactive, constantly in back-to-back meetings with no visible deep work, that’s the model you’re handing your team, whether you mean to or not. You end up with a whole organisation optimised for busyness rather than quality.

If you want a culture where quality is the priority, where people protect large blocks of time for meaningful, high-value work, it starts by you doing it first, visibly. Turn up and do the work the way you’d want your team to do theirs.

Your homework

This week, go through the exercise yourself:

Identify job that only you can do — the work that protects the future of the company.
Name your top three sources of distraction.
Block your 20% time into your calendar, permanently.
Set your inbound triage times.
Build your shutdown routine.

Try it for two weeks. Then look back and ask yourself what actually moved — what decision got made, what problem got solved, what got clearer for your team — that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Email me at chris@chrismarr.co.uk and tell me what shifted. I’d genuinely like to know.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.

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