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538: Improve your focus in a distracting world- with Jones Loflin

1d ago 19:42

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How product leaders can stay as focused as a bee

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TLDR

In today’s distraction-filled world, product managers and leaders struggle to maintain focus. In my recent podcast interview with Jones Loflin, author of Focused as a Bee, we explored how the honeybee’s remarkable focus and intentionality can teach us valuable productivity lessons. Jones shared six “permissions” that form a framework for improving focus, along with practical strategies for managing distractions and creating environments conducive to deep work. This article unpacks these concepts specifically for product leaders looking to enhance their productivity and effectiveness.

Key Topics

Lessons from honeybees for product managers
The difference between being “busy” versus being “focused”
The six permissions to focus: Prioritize, Plan, Be Unavailable, Recharge, Change, and Be Consistent
Practical strategies for managing both internal and external distractions
Creating triggers and environments that support focused work
Applying focus techniques with limited schedule control
Using focus to drive product innovation and change management

Introduction

Have you ever reached the end of your workday and wondered, “What did I even accomplish today?” With endless emails, notifications, and distractions pulling us in every direction, staying focused feels harder than ever. But what if we could take a lesson from one of nature’s most efficient workers—the honeybee—to regain control of our attention and productivity?

That’s exactly what today’s guest, Jones Loflin, will share with us—practical tips and mindset hacks for improving our focus.

Jones is a successful speaker and the author of several books including his latest, Focused As A Bee, as well as Always Growing, Juggling Elephants, and Getting To It. He also worked as a senior trainer on the best-selling book, Who Moved My Cheese? Jones has 30 years of experience, growing confident leadership, implementing change and improving productivity with simple, no-fluff solutions.

Focused as a Bee

The statistics are sobering: 79% of professionals find it impossible to focus for more than an hour, with 59% unable to maintain focus for even 30 minutes. Our thoughts typically shift to something else after just three minutes.

Most of us have heard the phrase “busy as a bee,” but Jones challenged this common expression. Being busy implies activity but not necessarily accomplishment. Through his experience as a beekeeper, Jones observed that bees are actually “focused as a bee” — intentionally directing their time and energy toward what’s most important at every moment.

This distinction is critical for product leaders. In our world of constant demands and shifting priorities, we can easily fall into the trap of being perpetually busy without achieving meaningful outcomes. The honeybee, however, demonstrates an unwavering commitment to what matters most for the colony’s survival and success.

Jones’s journey into beekeeping began when he and his daughter received a hive as a gift. Their first colony died after a year because they weren’t good beekeepers yet. This experience taught them an important lesson: Bees have a mind of their own and remain laser-focused on what they want to accomplish. While humans can assist them, we can’t change their fundamental nature.

For product leaders, this serves as a reminder that success requires more than just activity. It demands intentional focus on outcomes that drive value for customers and the organization. Just as a bee’s focus is often a matter of colony life and death, our ability to focus on what truly matters can determine the success or failure of our products and teams.

The book Focused as a Bee takes the form of a business parable about two individuals: one struggling with focus and another who has learned focus principles through beekeeping. Through their story, Jones introduces six key permissions that can help anyone, especially busy product leaders, improve their focus and productivity.

Permission to Focus

The first step of Jones’s framework is giving yourself permission to focus. This might sound obvious, but Jones’s pointed out that most of us naturally give ourselves permission to be distracted without realizing it. We respond to every notification, allow frequent interruptions, and rarely create conditions that support deep concentration.

For product leaders, intentional focus requires acknowledging that it doesn’t come naturally in our distraction-filled environments. It demands conscious effort and deliberate actions. Without this fundamental permission, we end up with those days where we ask ourselves, “Where did the time go?” or “What did I actually accomplish?”

Under the overarching permission to focus, there are six other permissions that we can must give ourselves in order to stay focused.

1. Permission to Prioritize

The first permission involves determining what’s most important based on your desired outcomes. Jones shared an interesting historical perspective: the word “priority” was originally singular, not plural. It was only during the industrial revolution that we began using the term “priorities,” suggesting we could focus on multiple important things simultaneously.

For product managers, prioritization is familiar territory. However, Jones emphasized that effective prioritization requires asking:

What outcomes do we want to achieve?
What will get us closer to our goals?
What deserves our time and attention right now?

This permission is as much about saying “no” as it is about saying “yes.” By clearly identifying what deserves your focus, you create boundaries around your time and energy. This is especially relevant in product management, where competing demands from stakeholders, customers, and technical teams can easily fragment your attention.

2. Permission to Plan

Product managers must give themselves permission to plan to optimize their time

The second permission involves investing time to plan your day, week, or month. Jones compared this to how honeybees prepare before swarming to a new location. Days before leaving, worker bees begin gorging on honey, ensuring they’re ready to depart without delay.

For product leaders, planning goes beyond creating simple to-do lists. Jones cautioned against stopping at list-making, which he called “scary” when done in isolation. Effective planning includes:

Planning Element	Application for Product Leaders
Time estimation	Calculate how long tasks will realistically take
Optimal timing	Schedule high-focus work during your peak mental energy hours
Time blocking	Reserve dedicated chunks of time for specific types of work
Location planning	Identify the optimal environment for different types of work

Even if your day is only 70% planned and you complete just half of those planned activities, that’s still better than having no plan and simply reacting to whatever seems urgent in the moment.

Jones acknowledged that most product professionals have limited control over their schedules, but planning can still help you optimize your time. If you only have control over 10% of your day, use that 10% more intentionally.

3. Permission to Be Unavailable

The third permission—being unavailable—may be the most challenging for product managers who pride themselves on their accessibility. Jones explained that we need to be unavailable to three key sources of distraction:

First, we must be unavailable to our inner thoughts. Product leaders often juggle numerous responsibilities, and our minds frequently interrupt our focus with unrelated tasks and concerns. Jones described how undone tasks roll around in our heads, making it difficult to concentrate. Having a solid plan (from permission two) helps minimize these mental interruptions.

Jones also discussed the “inner critic”—that internal voice questioning our abilities or decisions. Rather than fighting this voice, he suggested making friends with it. He named his inner critic “Frank,” after a lovable but crusty farmer who would question his home improvement projects. By acknowledging this voice with humor and understanding it’s trying to protect us, we can move past its interruptions more easily.

Second, we need to be unavailable to external distractions. For product leaders, these come in many forms: email notifications, Slack messages, open office environments, or even unfinished projects visible from our workspace. Jones suggested these practical strategies:

Move to a different environment when deep focus is required
Use headphones to block out noise
Disable notifications during focus periods
Clear visual distractions from your workspace

Third, and perhaps most relevant for product leaders, is being unavailable to the expectations of others. How often do we struggle to focus because we’re uncertain what stakeholders really want? Clarifying expectations upfront—understanding precisely what success looks like—creates mental space for focused execution. For product managers, this might mean asking more detailed questions during requirement gathering or having explicit discussions about acceptance criteria before starting work.

4. Permission to Recharge

The fourth permission recognizes that focus requires energy—mental, physical, and emotional. Jones shared that in a healthy hive, bees take about 40 naps per day. Even more surprising, foraging bees—those with the most demanding work—take up to 50 naps daily. These aren’t long breaks, but brief moments to recharge before the next focused effort.

For product leaders, this translates to strategic pauses throughout the day. Jones cautioned against the common practice of scheduling back-to-back meetings without breaks. By the third consecutive meeting, our focus and effectiveness significantly diminish. Instead, he recommended:

Taking short breaks between major tasks or meetings
Using transitions to capture thoughts from the previous activity
Consciously “resetting” before moving to the next priority
Recognizing when pushing through fatigue becomes counterproductive

For product managers specifically, these strategic recharge moments can be particularly valuable when switching between different modes of work—moving from a customer interview to a technical discussion, or from data analysis to creative brainstorming.

5. Permission to Change

The fifth permission involves being willing to change your approach when current methods aren’t working. Jones described how bees immediately adapt their behavior when their environment changes, such as when a hive is split. They don’t waste time continuing with ineffective behaviors.

For product leaders, this means regularly assessing:

What’s not working in your current focus approach?
What processes or habits need adjustment?
Which environments or times of day are proving unproductive?
How might you reorganize your schedule to align with your energy patterns?

Jones shared a personal example of adjusting his schedule to take advantage of beautiful afternoon weather for outdoor tasks, which required changing his morning routine. This willingness to adapt, rather than rigidly sticking to established patterns, enables more effective focus and greater productivity.

6. Permission to Be Consistent

The final permission emphasizes the power of consistency. Jones observed that honeybees exhibit remarkable consistency in their behaviors—emerging from the hive when temperatures reach 55-60 degrees and maintaining consistent roles and activities within the colony. This consistency, over time, yields the results they need for survival and success.

For product leaders, consistency means establishing reliable routines and triggers that signal to your brain it’s time to focus. Jones shared a personal example of using scent as a focus trigger. He keeps a specific candle in his office and simply removes the lid (without lighting it) when it’s time for deep work. Through conditioning, that scent now signals to his brain that it’s time to concentrate.

Product managers can create their own focus triggers:

A specific location designated for certain types of work
Background music or sounds that signal focus time
Physical objects that represent the transition to focused work
Consistent routines before important thinking sessions
Environmental cues that train your brain to enter flow state more quickly

Practical Strategies for Managing Interruptions

Practical strategies to help product managers avoid distractions

Beyond the six permissions, Jones offered tactical advice for handling the interruptions that inevitably punctuate a product manager’s day.

One simple but effective technique is verbally stating your intention before starting a task. Simply saying aloud, “I’m going to LinkedIn to look up this specific person’s profile” helps your brain stay on track and resist tangential distractions. Jones suggested celebrating when you complete your intended action without getting sidetracked, reinforcing the positive behavior.

Create Friction for Distractions

Drawing from James Clear’s Atomic Habits, Jones recommended making the right things easier and creating friction for distractions. This might include:

Moving your phone to another room during focus sessions
Closing unnecessary browser tabs
Using website blockers during designated focus time
Setting up your workspace to minimize visual distractions
Creating physical distance from potential interruptions

Interruption Filters

Particularly useful for product leaders working in busy environments is Jones’s concept of “interruption filters.” Before beginning focused work, explicitly decide which conditions justify an interruption. Write these down rather than keeping them in your head:

What types of messages warrant immediate attention?
Which team members can interrupt during focus time?
What level of urgency justifies breaking your concentration?

By defining these boundaries in advance, you train your brain to filter out less important interruptions and maintain focus on high-value work.

Conclusion

In today’s hyper-distracted world, the ability to focus has become a rare and valuable skill for product leaders. Through the wisdom of honeybees and Jones Loflin’s six permissions framework, we can develop practices that help us direct our attention to what truly matters. By giving ourselves permission to focus, prioritize, plan, be unavailable, recharge, and be consistent, we create the conditions for meaningful productivity rather than mere busyness.

As product leaders, our effectiveness depends on our ability to balance competing demands while maintaining focus on strategic priorities. The honeybee—with its unwavering commitment to what matters most for the colony—offers an inspiring model. By applying these focus principles in our daily work, we can not only enhance our personal productivity but also lead our teams more effectively, drive innovation more consistently, and create products that truly matter to our customers.

Useful Links

Check out Focused As A Bee
Connect with Jones on LinkedIn
Visit Jones’s website

Innovation Quote

“Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you can see farther.” – Zig Ziglar

Application Questions

How could you apply the “permission to prioritize” concept to your current product roadmap? What items might you need to remove or defer to maintain better focus on your highest-value initiatives?
Think about your personal work environment. What specific distractions most frequently interrupt your focus, and how could you apply the “permission to be unavailable” to create better boundaries around these interruptions?
How could your team implement the concept of strategic “recharging” during your sprint or development cycles? What might dedicated focus and recharge periods look like within your existing process?
Consider your most recent product initiative that faced challenges. How could applying the “believable first step” approach have changed the outcome? What would that first step have looked like?
How could you create consistent focus triggers or environments for different types of product management work (user research, story writing, stakeholder management)? What environmental cues might help you and your team transition more effectively between these different modes?

Bio

Product Manager Interview - Jones Loflin

Jones Loflin is a keynote speaker, coach, and author who helps individuals and organizations struggling with too much to do. With three decades of experience, he offers simple yet powerful strategies for focus, time management, and change. His books include Juggling Elephants and Always Growing. His latest release, Focused As a Bee, offers fresh insights on how to maintain focus in a world where we are constantly being distracted.

Thanks!

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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538: Improve your focus in a distracting world- with Jones Loflin

Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

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published 1d ago