In a world saturated with to-do lists, project management apps, and endless notifications, many high-achieving professionals and business owners find themselves exhausted by task management—the relentless tracking of every single item. If your accountability system feels like micromanagement, you’re not alone. The truth is, tracking everything only distracts you from the one to three things that actually move the needle for your business.
In this deep-dive episode—the second in our series on true accountability—Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo shift the conversation from mere consistency to the power of focus. We unpack the difference between task management (which is often just responding to urgency) and true focus (which is proactively driving long-term, important impact). Why do so many leaders struggle to focus? Hint: It involves a dopamine hit and a chronic case of “shiny object syndrome.”
Discover how shifting your attention to just a few critical, non-urgent tasks can dramatically reduce firefighting, eliminate rework, and, most importantly, create the kind of alignment and momentum that moves your entire team forward. If you’re ready to stop putting Band-Aids on problems and start building strategic, lasting success, this is the essential guide you need to redefine what you track.
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Watch the episode here
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Stop Tracking Everything. Start Tracking What Matters.
Most accountability systems fail because they try to track everything. True accountability is not about your entire to-do list. It is about one to three things that actually move the needle. It is about making hard decisions on what those one to three things are and sticking with the decision over time. Going back to part one of the series, where we talked about consistency. If you cannot be consistent, the rest of what we are talking about is not really going to be that helpful because consistency is the first step.
After you recognize consistency and the importance of that and shore up the system so you can be more consistent, we can actually talk about the subject of this episode, which is focus. Now here is where you realize how important focus is. By now, most of us are aware of the Eisenhower matrix, and most planning systems, project management systems are built around the fact that what is urgent almost always takes priority over what is important.
That leaves a lot of us stuck. Most project management systems are designed so that you keep what is important, but not urgent, front and center. Now, Gwen, I think most of us understand the difference between urgent and important. I feel like I am the poster child for prioritizing urgent over important because I have built my career around working in environments where there is always urgency.
I was in a newspaper, and stories had to be filed by 4:00 PM, no matter what. Yet, if there were a four-fatality collision, we might have to wipe everything that was planned for the front page and put that front and center. I have been conditioned to always focus on the urgency, put out the fire, so to speak.
I have not had a lot of practice until working with you in proactively thinking about what one problem I could solve that would solve 100 others. I think, though, in order to really focus, give it its fair share of attention, we really have to first discuss the difference between task management and accountability. I would like you to start us off there.
Task Management Vs. Accountability
Task management is about all the things on the list on any given day. It is answering the email, it is having the client meetings, and it is recording the show. It is all the things that are on the list, right? Most of those things fall into that urgent and important category, because meeting with a client is important. It is also urgent if you are scheduled to meet with them at 8:00 AM in the morning. Both things are true there. A lot of the task list is urgent and important. That is without a doubt.
Usually, what lies at the end of the task list are the important and not urgent things. The things that you are going to have to dig into. One of the things that I have on my task lists regularly that definitely falls into the important but not urgent category is what I call thinking time. It does not feel like we are actually getting anything done. There is no serious check mark that goes along with it. We can say, “I did it, but where is the result?”
How do you prove you did it? How do I prove I thought effectively today?
The Challenge Of Prioritizing Urgent Over Important
The task list, we get really focused on all the things that we can actually say, “I created three posts that will go up on social media next week.” All of those things. It’s not that they are important. Some of these are important, but they can also be urgent. We try to schedule ahead of time for recording a podcast. If we did not, they could become urgent, and we believe that they are important. We consider them important as well. The task list is about all of the things where accountability is trying to move out of that urgent column.
Focus on the important column and particularly the important and not urgent column. Although, as you said, your job history has conditioned you to focus on the urgent, I would say almost all of us have been conditioned to focus on the urgent, particularly if you are under the age of 40. If you are on that cusp between 40 and 50, probably still to some degree, because we have these silly things that are in our pockets that allow everyone access immediately, all the time. If someone does not respond right away, we are like, “They must be dead.”
For those who are tuning in and not watching us on YouTube right now, she held up her cell phone.
I bet even without that clue, they still knew what it was. Good point. We have gotten so conditioned to urgency about everything. I am old enough to remember saying this out loud to somebody. This is decades and decades ago, about when FedEx was just starting to become a thing and saying, “Why would anybody need to receive a document in the mail in less than one day? How could that ever be useful? Why would anybody need that?” Between email and all of the other technologies. Now it is not just about mail, it is about like, I just ordered this giant thing, and if it is not on my doorstep by tomorrow, what the heck?
Task management is about all the things—everything on the list on any given day. Share on XIt is like, I was just thinking how it has even conditioned our kids. When I was a kid, I started thinking about my Halloween costume in August. My best friend whose mom made her costumes by hand was thinking as soon as this Halloween passed about next Halloween’s costume because she knew her mom needed time.
Now my kids come to me two days before Halloween with some elaborate costume idea, expecting that I can order it from Amazon and have it here. Which, by the way, never happens. I am like, “That will be here in four weeks because it has to come from a foreign country.” To your point, you can think of things sometimes until they are urgent because we’re conditioned that everything can land in our lap.
The challenge that we have these days is that we focus on our task as we get our task list done. If we start working on the task list, where we default to when we finish the important and urgent things, is the urgent and not important things, because the urgent is our default.
Honestly, urgency feels good to tackle.
The idea of focus is saying, “Instead of dropping down the urgent, what if we scoop over to the important, as thinking time is my example. Instead of saying, “I’ve got 30 minutes, let’s see how many emails I can get through.” Most of the time, emails are urgent and usually not that important. They feel urgent. They are actually probably not that urgent either, but they feel urgent.
They’ve got that urgency around them. What if instead of taking 30 minutes to go through emails, I actually spent 30 minutes thinking strategically about what needed to be done, or meditating and quieting my mind and my body? These are not our normal responses. This is what the idea of focus is, and moving away from task management, because task management really is about the urgent.
It is about the urgent and important, and it is about the urgent and not important. It is about what we get checked off because it needs to be checked off today. When we talk about focus, we are really talking about what has a long-term impact that we can make micro steps toward that will have a much bigger outcome.
Task management is about urgency—it focuses on what’s urgent and important, and even what’s urgent but not important. Focus, on the other hand, is about long-term impact—taking small, intentional steps that compound into much greater outcomes over time. Share on XWhat you are talking about is shifting from being reactive to being proactive. Piggybacking off of the last episode, where we talked about the consistency piece, is when you are talking about true accountability, you are really talking about shifting your attention to the proactive work because that is solving the one problem today that actually solves 100 problems down the line.
And/or has a bigger impact on lots of things in your world. It can be solving a problem, but it can also be about having a bigger impact because it is the thing that is going to shift the business. It is going to shift energy. It is going to change the culture. It is whatever it happens to be, but it is not just a quick hit, and it is done. There are usually elements of that that are quick hits to get it done. That is where we really talk about accountability, to say, “What are the one or two things that are going to have long-term impact that you can get done this week?”
Our process is a weekly process. We think about it as what can be done this week. You may have some folks who like two-week sprints. Maybe it is a two-week process. The timeframe does not matter as long as it is not too long. Since it’s too long, we wait until the last couple of days to do it until it becomes urgent. Now we have lost it. We are back to doing tasks and not actually being proactive in our focus and thinking about it ahead of time.
For me, that is where the difference lies in the focus piece. A lot of folks who talk about accountability really are talking about task management. Did you do it or did you not do it? Not that that is not needed and/or that it is not important. Both things can be true. It can be needed, and it can be important. It does not actually mean that you are being accountable because accountable is saying, reflecting on the things that we did.
It is also problem-solving on the things that are not getting done. Most of the things that are on the task list do not need to be reflected on. I do not need to reflect on every email. I may need to reflect on how I am processing my email, but that starts to become more of a bigger issue because we are probably talking about something broader than that. I pay attention to every client conversation I have, but I do not need to reflect on whether I should have spent 30 minutes on this conversation when that is what we are doing.
To me, this is where it is the difference between, are we doing the things that just need to be done? The way that I define it is I do not want anything in my accountability process, what I am focusing on, on things that I will obviously do regardless. For instance, showing up to a client meeting never needs to be part of my accountability process. I am not going to show up to a meeting unless I am actually sick or something major has happened.
I am going to show up to my meetings. I do not need to be held accountable for that. I am not going to need to be held accountable for managing my email because I am going to do that. Some people do need to have that as their accountability. It is not. These things are tasks, and these things are not. It is more about what are the things that you are automatically going to do, as opposed to what are the things will just keep slipping down the list?
Part of that brings it back to the topic of this episode, which is focus. Why do you think business owners struggle with focus? Let me put that just a different way. What is the challenge that prevents them from focusing just on those one to three things that they are not going to automatically do? What makes them put the big laundry list of things?
Why Business Owners Struggle With Focus
First is what we talked about right at the beginning, which is that everybody likes the satisfaction. They love that dopamine hit of I did the thing, whatever the thing is. Most of the things that we need to be held accountable for do not have that same level of dopamine hit, because it is not just this quick hit thing.
Back to what we were talking about earlier with the urgency, I have zero doubt that we are all way more dopamine addicted than we were 20 or 30 years ago, just because of the way everything works in our environment these days, back to the phone dinging and email dinging and all the things that are like, “Someone cares, someone is paying attention.” That to me is one of the issues that is related to it, is that we do not get that same dopamine hit, that instant sort of piece of it.
Another piece of it is related to the nature of owner-entrepreneurs, who see all the possibilities. It is why they are an entrepreneur. True entrepreneurs. There are some folks that I call business owners as opposed to entrepreneurs, who own a business, and we do the thing, and we make it happen, and there is nothing wrong about that. A real entrepreneur sees all the possibilities.
We joke about it all the time about their visionary or shiny object or squirrel or all of those things. What it really is is that they see all the possibilities. Because of that, it is hard to pull down and say, “If I choose X, that means I am not choosing A, B, D, F, G, and K.” There is some amount of it. It is probably a little overstated, but maybe not mental anguish in that.
When we say I am not saying you cannot do all of those other things. We just cannot do them all now. I think that is another reason why they are struggling with it. A huge percentage of them, that I see all the possibilities and I chase a lot of them at the same time, got them started. They feel like it is the thing that if they stop doing it, they are going to fail. Which is not true at all.
Back to when it is just them, they can keep all of that in their head. When you start having any amount of other teams, and because we are talking accountability, we are talking that there is someone else who needs some accountability piece of it, which means they are not necessarily wired in that same way. You jumping from one thing to another thing to the other thing actually is detrimental to the organization as a whole.
They see the big picture, and the team does not. This is something that I have experienced before, where I cannot read minds. I know I cannot read minds, but that does not mean that I do not have clients or that I have not had supervisors in the past who assume I can. Even knowing that I do not read minds does not mean that I have not fallen victim to expecting my team to read my mind.
It is not even reading minds. What it really is is that certain things are so obvious to us that they would never be obvious to somebody else. You and I have this conversation a lot, where you will say something to me. It is like, “You know that most people do not know that, or most people do not think that way, or most people do not do that.”
I am sure every time I stare at you like, “What do you mean? That cannot possibly be true.” That is part of the problem. We see all of the things that are so obvious to us. Usually, only a very small percentage of that is obvious to the rest of the world. Back to when you get someone who is a real entrepreneur, a real visionary, not only do they see all of it, but they see so much more than everybody else does. It still seems so obvious to them.
I just think of the last week alone, the number of things that Sophia, because she is a VA that we share, has asked me, which has made my initial response frustrated, because how do you not know that? Sixty seconds later, it is like, “Of course, she does not know that.” I have my own show, and I have an episode where my audio is trash, Gwen. Never happened to me before, right? My audio is terrible, but the guest sounds great. It just does not make sense to reschedule it.
I just sent Sophia a note that says, “Just make sure to let the guest know.” Sophia’s question is, “What exactly do you want me to tell the guest?” I am like, “They sound awesome, I sound horrible, we know this, but because they sound so awesome, we are not going to reschedule the interview. I do not want to take up more of their time.”
As I am thinking this through, I am like, “How would Sophia know any of that? How would she know to approach it with, “You sound so amazing, we have made the decision not to re-record.” Tonya is willing to suck up the fact that she sounds awful in the interview. There were just too many good moments that we just do not think we could recapture them if we rescheduled.”
Sophia does not have twenty years of experience in this. Sophia does not have a personal relationship with the guest. Of course, she is going to have no clue. I see the whole picture. I go like, “It is 1 episode out of 20 in the grand scheme. I am getting 300 audience members a month in the grand scheme of things. It is not worth the cost associated with rerecording the interview.
We want the guest to know that just because they listen to it, we do not want them to think that they are the only person who hears how bad my audio is. We want them to know it is intentional in all of these things. I only know that because this is like the eighth episode I have worked on.” Sophia is just like, she knows her job is guest relations, but I have to connect the dots for her on how my bad audio or one bad episode relates to her role in guest relations.
That is a classic example of us making too big an assumption. Let us get back to focus.
Here is my point with that. On the focus issue, CEOs have a hard time, I think, based on what you are saying, is that they see the whole big picture. Their team does not. Piggybacking on my story, they think the priorities are obvious. I am so guilty of this, Gwen, it is not even funny. As I am speaking this, I am like, “I did not mean to create an episode specifically for me, but here we are talking about what I need to hear.”
Me too. There are several times it is like, “How is this not obvious?” It’s like, “Right.” Same different story, but the exact same through line of like, “Yeah,” there would be no way for someone else to know what is going on in my head. When we talk about focus on accountability, one of the things I move away from is the task list. I do not care about all the things that you are doing. I care about the one, two, possibly three things over a period of time, and we work in quarters.
I tell people to work in whatever chunks of time seem logical. I do not want you to go more than six months, but some folks, a two-month period makes more sense for their rhythms, a four-month period may make more sense for their rhythms. Generally, if you do not know, 90 days is a good timeframe. What within that timeframe would actually move the needle in a significant way that, if you do not give attention to, is not going to happen? That is the key piece about the focus.
Ninety days is a good time frame—but the key is identifying what within it will truly move the needle. What deserves attention now, because if you don’t focus on it, it won’t happen? That’s the essence of focus: big enough to matter, yet realistic… Share on XBig enough that it fits the time frame. It is not something that is like, “I need to write 13 posts for the next 13 weeks.” I bet if you took one day, you could probably do that. I’m not sure that’s the thing that we’re talking about here. It may be talking about how to develop a consistent strategy, and part of that is writing thirteen posts for the next thirteen weeks. It is about what is the thing that is going to move the needle that is not necessarily obvious or that will be easy to slip.
For example, one of the things that we are focusing on in this particular quarter that we are recording is refining and defining what our accountability training process is, looks like, and who it is directed toward. Would we not do anything on that if we did not have it as a focus? I doubt it. We probably would, but we actually set some specific guidelines for things that we wanted to be true by the time we got to the end of the quarter, so that we are working on those things as we are going along.
As I said, it is not like I would not do anything, but I can assure you I would not be thinking about it as often as I am and in the same way if we did not have some accountability on it. The other piece of it is as I get stuck or as I have concerns, this is part of our accountability process, which is we reflect, and we start talking about it and saying, “What is actually the problem? Where are we actually stuck? How do we want to think about that?” Not that we do not talk about any of the other things that are going on in the world that may be officially under tasks, but we do not focus on the task unless there is actually a problem to solve.
It is not just about checking the box and saying, “I do all the things.” To me, that is why the focus piece is really important. Knowing that what you focus on this quarter could be completely different than what you focus on next quarter or what you focused on the quarter before. It could be related. It can be completely unrelated. It could be bigger. It could be smaller. There are no rules about it other than we are confident it is going to move the needle. If we do not focus on it, it probably will not get done.
Focus Narrows Attention For Strategic Impact
That is what brings us to something that you have talked about before. First of all, what you are saying is that the focus is what builds the strategic thinking. Something that you have talked about several times is that it is one to three things, because if it is everything, then you cannot actually make any measurable movement in any one of the things. It is one to three things. I think your example of this accountability training process is a really good one because it is a thing that, on one hand, is so big.
Focus is what builds strategic thinking. It’s about one to three things—because if it’s everything, you can’t make measurable progress on any one of them. Share on XIt does not feel like it should ever have to be on the list because it is just going to get done, but it is also so big that it cannot be accomplished in a single day, a single week. Because it cannot be accomplished in a single day, in a single week, it is very easy to say, “I will just focus on that one next week. I will do all these other things and then focus on that one next week,” ignoring the fact or forgetting the fact that next week is going to bring its own series of interruptions.
That is the piece that we are talking about when we talk about the Eisenhower matrix and the important and urgent. What I believe to be true, and I do not have enough other examples to say this is true yet, but I am still confident that it is right, is if you start doing more accountability and therefore working on things in the important and not urgent category, over time, fewer and fewer things land in the important and urgent category because you actually get them done before they become urgent.
For me, the difference here is that it is the proactive approach versus the reactive approach. Not that you cannot do good work in an urgent state, because you can, but not consistently all the time. However, in a proactive state, you almost always can do good work because you can think about the choice, and you are not looking at the thing that is fastest. You are looking at the thing that is best. To me, that is where that distinction starts to come in.
When we get to an urgent situation, at some point, our choice is between the best option and the fastest option. Sometimes those are the same thing, but most of the time they are not. Fastest usually is more of a band-aid as opposed to a permanent fix. Coming back from my old background in the IT world, if we had to do something urgently, it usually meant we had to do it again correctly.
It is the work equivalent of, “Just put this here for now.” At home, you are like, you just set something on a counter, and you are like, “I will put it here for now.” That does not stop you from having to put it away at some point. Why not just put it away?
It is exactly that thing. It ends up being that you are taking more time and energy in the long run to get to the thing that you are actually looking for. When we are proactive, most of the time we do not, like I said, not that there is never rework, because occasionally there is, but in my experience, there is way less rework when we are doing it in the important and not urgent state of mind.
That level of focus narrows your attention. You are paying attention to fewer things. It helps you to develop discernment. It just makes it very clear. It is either moving this thing forward or it is not moving this thing forward. That discernment also makes us better at delegation, which I think for most CEOs is the hardest part of accountability. It is handing something off to somebody and releasing both the task and full responsibility for the outcome of the task.
We now understand what we want as the outcome, as opposed to just knowing how we have to do the thing.
We have now got the discernment piece. We are like, “Now I can think ahead to like, what does success look like? When I hand it off, I can say this is how we are measuring success. This is how long I think it may take. This is what I think needs to be done. What are your questions?” We can have all of these conversations about how to do this well without this deadline looming over our heads, which makes us just get it done.
For yourself, even if you are not delegating it for yourself, it allows you that same space to say, “What does success look like?” Even if you are not delegating it to say what success really, really looks like? Going back to the example that we are using for ourselves, because we have got this as an accountability process, I was able to think through the question, which technically someone would say, “This is a totally obvious question,” but it is not.
We have been testing out the process with all sorts of businesses and environments to figure out where it works and where it does not work. What it got to was, even though it may work in a lot of environments, where do we actually want to launch it? What particular industry niche, however you want to define it, do we want to launch it? As I said, for a lot of people, that is such an obvious question. Yeah, but not necessarily.
I know for myself, if we had waited and we were doing it in the important and urgent, it would just be like, just blast it out there because it works for 85% of the companies that are out there, and it will be fine. The messaging would be more vague, broader, and more of the things. Instead, because we are making some choices quite a bit earlier, we can be working on that messaging specifically toward those audiences. We will not have to rework the messaging later on to see what stuck and what did not.
As we bring this episode into focus to a close. What is your hope that the listener walks away with?
To understand that focus is important because it allows you to actually make progress on a thing. It does mean that you do not get to do everything all at once. It does not mean you do not get to do everything. You just do not get to do everything now. It is about making some choices and seeing that progress so that you can say, “This is far enough. I have gotten it where I need to go. I can hand it off. It is completed so that I can go on to the next thing.”
Understanding focus is important because it allows you to make real progress on what matters. It doesn’t mean you can’t do everything—it just means you can’t do everything at once. Share on XWhatever that piece is. By doing that, it also allows your people to know what they are working on. They are not jumping from one thing to the other thing to the other thing. Like, “I thought this was a priority. Apparently, it is not. Now this thing is a priority. Wait, no, I thought that was not.” This is another place that allows you to create momentum and actually start building on that flywheel concept that, once you get going, just keeps going and going.
Focus Enables Alignment & Momentum
What I heard is that all these people who say they do not like accountability because it is micromanagement. At this point, what I hope an audience hears is that accountability is not micromanagement, but accountability without focus can very easily become micromanagement. What focus does, to the point that you just made, is that it creates alignment. It ensures alignment between all of us. It is that alignment that builds momentum. We are all working toward the shared goal. We are all taking ownership over our piece of the journey to the shared goal, whatever that is.
It is the phrase that we hear a lot, but the folks who have been using this process internally have said, “We are now all rowing in the same direction.”
Not stepping on each other’s toes, not crisscrossing.
If you have ever been in a rowboat with more than one person or something similar, when you first start, you are not going very much. Once you start creating some momentum and you are all doing it in the same way and at the same time, row, row, row, you really can build a huge amount of momentum over time. Rowing all in the same direction is a way bigger thing than you think it might be.
Here is what I say to the audience. If you are tuning in, whether you identify as a business owner or you are a professional, if you are tuning in and you are like, “Who are you talking about? Narrowing focus, and that feels hard.” If you think it feels harder than it should, I think a really good first step is to subscribe to Gwen’s weekly question. It is just one email drops in your inbox every single Friday, and it does not take more than like a minute and a half to read.
It is just a single strategic prompt that is designed to sharpen your thinking. It focuses your attention on one little thing. Spend 5 minutes, 15 minutes reflecting on that. You can respond if you want a response back from Gwen, but you do not have to. To sign up, all you have to do is go to www.tonyakubo.com/Question. It is free, but it is a really good way to practice sharpening your focus and getting into that proactive state of thinking versus that reactive state of thinking.
Make sure to join us for the next episode, where we close out the series on accountability. First episode talked about consistency, this episode talked about focus, and next week we are going to tie it all together on something that I think has a little bit of a prickly connotation, which is feedback. We will let you hear more about that on the next episode.
Mentioned in This Episode
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
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