Discover the hidden cost of hustle: focus leakage. Learn how to track your Attention Ratio to reclaim hours of deep, high-value work each month.
I. The Unspoken Cost
There’s a founder I know who just celebrated a big milestone. On LinkedIn, the celebration posts tell one story: funding secured, team growing, customers converting.
But a conversation over coffee tells another…
“I’m working harder than ever, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m losing my grip on what actually matters.”
Sound familiar?
This founder isn’t alone.
Neither is the creative studio owner who built her business around purposeful work but finds herself drowning in the very mission that once energised her.
Or the executive who climbs into bed each night with a buzzing mind, replaying the dozen half-finished conversations that will demand attention tomorrow.
They’re all paying what I call the hidden tax of hustle.
It’s a levy not paid in cash, but in something far more precious: the quality of their attention.
II. What We’re Really Losing When We “Stay Busy”
Focus leakage isn’t a productivity problem. It’s an attention crisis.
It’s the cumulative loss of cognitive energy that happens when our brains are spread too thin across too many surfaces.
It’s decision fatigue wearing down our judgment. It’s context switching fragmenting our days into unusable pieces. It’s the constant hum of notifications training our minds to expect interruption.
In my book The Cadence Effect, I wrote about how chasing “balance” sets us up to fail because it implies a static state, where everything is held perfectly still. But life and work are always moving. What we need instead is cadence: rhythms that flex and adapt while protecting our most valuable resources i.e. our health and our attention.
Without cadence, focus doesn’t just leak, it haemorrhages.
The research tells us just how costly this bleeding becomes.
Gloria Mark’s work at UC Irvine found that knowledge workers spend 2.5 hours every day simply recovering from interruptions and task switches.
That’s more than a full working day lost every week, often without our conscious awareness. Add the distraction of social media to the mix and we increase time lost.
For leaders, this isn’t just about delayed emails or pushed-back meetings. Those lost hours represent diluted decisions, diminished creativity, and derailed strategic thinking. The very capacities that define effective leadership.
Focus leakage is insidious because it can masquerade as productivity.
The screen glows, the calendar fills, notifications flow. But the substance — the deep, meaningful work that actually moves the needle — slips away like water through cupped hands.
III. When Every Decision Costs You Twice
Every choice we make extracts a toll from our mental reserves.
For leaders, this burden multiplies exponentially.
Should we pivot the product roadmap? Which candidate deserves the final interview? How do we respond to that investor’s pointed question about burn rate? What do we do about the team member who’s clearly struggling?
The sheer volume can become overwhelming.
Decision fatigue has been studied for decades, and the findings are sobering.
In one landmark study, judges making parole decisions were significantly more likely to deny parole later in the day when their cognitive resources were depleted. After breaks, when their decision-making energy was restored, the likelihood of granting parole jumped back up.
The same is true no matter what job role you have.
The quality of our choices isn’t just about information or experience. It’s about energy.
I see this pattern repeatedly in the leaders I work with. After days stacked with back-to-back decisions, they default to “safe” options.
That could be postponing bold moves, greenlighting initiatives that don’t quite align with their vision, or saying yes when they mean no. Not because they lack good judgment, but because their decision-making reserves are running on empty.
Unchecked, this fatigue drives leaders into reactive mode. Instead of designing the future, they’re firefighting the present. Over time, it erodes not just their effectiveness, but their confidence in their own judgment.
IV. The Hidden Cost of Digital Whiplash
If decision fatigue drains us slowly, then context switching cuts with surgical precision.
Modern leadership can feel like conducting an orchestra where every musician is playing a different song.
A Slack notification here, an urgent email there, a quick check of the analytics dashboard. It may feel like we’re multitasking like a pro, but our brains aren’t wired for this constant switching.
Research shows it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption. Multiply that across a typical day of digital distractions, and leaders lose hours without even registering the theft.
I discussed this phenomenon in recent episodes of the Creating Cadence podcast, particularly around how many founders normalise this firefighting mode.
The adrenaline of constant activity can feel productive, even heroic.
But context switching systematically degrades the very capabilities leaders depend on: clarity, focus, and creative problem-solving.
One tech founder described their days as “toggling between investor presentations, product strategy, and team management, never getting deep enough into any one activity to actually think clearly about what was truly needed.”
A creative agency owner painted a similar picture of her frustration. “I’m bouncing between client work, business development, and operational fires, ending each day feeling busy, but somehow unaccomplished, with a massive to-do list waiting for tomorrow. And then I go home to my family and have to somehow hold space for them too, when I’m mentally exhausted.”
The real cost isn’t the lost time. It’s the slow erosion of strategic capacity.
Strategic capacity is the ability to think deeply, connect disparate ideas, and lead with vision rather than reaction.
And too much on our plate erodes our strategic capacity.
V. The Always-On Trap
Hustle culture has created an interruption economy.
This is a system where constant availability is mistaken for commitment, and busyness becomes a status symbol.
On average, knowledge workers (aka people who use computers and their brains to make things, as opposed to using their hands, like we did in the ‘olden days’) check email every six minutes.
Many respond to messages within seconds, even after hours, creating an always-on dynamic that dissolves the boundaries between work and recovery.
There are parts of the world where it has become law not to email or work outside of “normal office hours”, and yet, the problem persists.
Some startup environments have embraced versions of China’s infamous “996” culture - that’s 9 a.m. to 9 pm, six days a week. This seems to be particularly prevalent with founders working in AI startups, who treat exhaustion (and sleeping under their desks) as proof of dedication.
The outcome of all these hustle tactics is what researchers now term the “infinite workday.”
No boundaries, no off switch, no space for the kind of thinking that actually drives breakthroughs. Just running on that unsustainable hamster wheel of hustle.
What they don’t seem to realise is that over the long term this isn’t sustainable. Even if their startup idea doesn’t fail in the short term, the physiological damage inflicted by this way of working means their bodies will later on.
Digital presenteeism is leaving founders and teams chronically exhausted and quietly burning out.
The irony is stark: in trying to show commitment, they’re undermining the very cognitive resources that make their commitment valuable and resilient.
One creative entrepreneur told me, “I found myself replying to client messages at midnight, not because it was urgent, but because I was afraid of seeming unavailable.”
A startup CEO described similar pressure. “I felt like I needed to be instantly responsive to my investors and team, but all that availability was making me less capable of the big-picture thinking they actually needed from me.”
Both were reinforcing the culture of interruptions, and paying for it with their inability to focus.
To avoid attention leakage, we need to set better boundaries, not just for the sake of our productivity, but also for our health and wellbeing.
VI. Finding Your Signal in the Noise
Here’s a helpful reminder: what gets measured gets managed.
If attention is our most valuable resource, we first need a way to track how we’re using it.
Let call this our Attention Ratio:
attention ratio = ratio of deep, high-value work hours to total logged work hours.
AR = HVW:Hrs
(If that term “attention ratio” doesn’t grab you, think of it as your “focus yield” or your “deep work index”)
For the maths geeks here, if you work 50-60 hours a week, but only 10-12 are spent in uninterrupted, high-focus flow, your attention ratio is 20%.
It doesn’t matter how packed your calendar is or how many emails you’ve sent. If your yield is low, you risk eroding your leadership edge.
Unlike traditional productivity metrics, like tasks completed, hours billed, or meetings attended, your attention ratio captures the quality of your attention. It illuminates leakage and offers a concrete benchmark for improvement.
In my book and on my podcast, I’ve emphasised treating attention like capital.
Attention is a valuable asset, something to be allocated, protected, and invested for maximum return.
Tracking your attention ratio makes this abstract principle tangible. It gives leaders a number to track, a dial to move, a way to measure what actually matters.
Think about it… would you accept a 20% return on your financial investments, when with some careful planning, you can get a higher return? So, why accept a lower ratio of return on your attention?
Consider: how can you improve your attention ratio score?
VII. 4 Practices to Reclaim Your Focus (Without Adding More Hustle)
Improving your attention ratio doesn’t require a complete overhaul, when small, consistent shifts will compound into meaningful gains.
In simple speak… pick one small thing to support your attention.
Here’s four evidence-based approaches to get you started:
1. Meeting Budgets
Cap your total meeting hours per week and fiercely protect “focus blocks.”
To preserve flow states companies like Dropbox have core collaboration hours and employees can decline meetings outside of those slots.
One founder I worked with reduced their meeting load from 35 hours to 20 hours per week simply by asking, “Does this need to be a meeting, or can it be an async update?”
2. Decision Batching
Save low-stakes choices for designated windows.
Steve Jobs wore identical outfits to preserve decision energy for what mattered. Leaders can apply this principle to scheduling, communications, or routine approvals. One CEO I know batches all hiring decisions to Thursday afternoons and all strategic reviews to Monday mornings.
3. Deep Work Sprints
Block 90-120 minute windows daily for uninterrupted focus.
Cal Newport’s research shows that even short deep work sessions dramatically improve output quality. The key isn’t duration, it’s protection. Treat these blocks like non-negotiable appointments with your most important thinking. A key thing to do during this time? Ditch notifications, and your phone. Hide it if you have to!
4. Recovery Rituals
Strategic breaks improve both energy and cognitive performance, so build micro-breaks and reset practices into your day.
The physiological sigh (two inhales through the nose, one long exhale through the mouth) can reduce stress and restore attention in under 30 seconds.
Personally, I prefer three long slow inhales and exhales for a quick shift in attention, but consciously slowing your breathing in any way changes your state for the better, so pick your preference.
Together, these four approaches can help you reclaim 5-10 hours of meaningful focus every month, without adding more work to your plate.
VIII. From Hustle to Cadence
Hustle culture sells the illusion of progress while silently bleeding the resource that leaders can least afford to lose: our capacity for clear, creative, decisive thinking.
But there’s another path forward.
Just as companies meticulously track cash burn, leaders can monitor their “focus burn”.
By measuring and improving our attention ratio, we can reclaim our most valuable asset: our depth of attention.
This isn’t about working less, it’s about working with intention.
It’s about recognising that sustainable leadership requires protecting the cognitive resources that make leadership possible in the first place.
The hidden tax of hustle may be real, but it’s not mandatory.
By shifting from reactive busyness to intentional cadence, we can build the spaciousness needed for maintaining our strategic capacity, so we can do the work that actually matters.
Your challenge this week: audit your own Attention Ratio.
Track how many hours are truly deep and focused.
Where are you doing high-value work versus how many hours are fragmented, distracted, or reactive?
Notice where attention leaks.
Then choose one of those 4 practices to patch the leak.
Because the choice between hustle and cadence isn’t just about productivity, it’s about the quality of leadership we bring to the work that matters most.
And just think, if you experience first-hand the power that making these changes has for you, imagine how powerful it would be for your company and your people, if you were able to help your team implement these approaches, too?
🌟 Gold star for you if wrangled your attention to read all the way to the end! 🌟
The next essay in this series explores why burnout should be treated as a board-level risk, not a personal failing.
If you’re ready to design systems that protect rather than drain your most valuable resources, subscribe to Creating Cadence to join leaders who are building sustainable success.
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Article References:
Gloria Mark et al. (2008). “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress.” UC Irvine.
S. Danziger, J. Levav & L. Avnaim-Pesso (2011). “Extraneous factors in judicial decisions.” PNAS.
McKinsey Global Institute. (2012). “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies.”
A.C. Keller, et al. (2020). “How taking breaks at work makes employees happier, more focused and more productive.” Journal of Applied Psychology.
Newport, Cal. (2016). Deep Work. Grand Central Publishing.
Katherine Bindley, Xavier Martinez & Rebecca PicciottoWall Street Journal. “AI Startup Founders, No Booze, No Sleep, No Fun”