Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Narrowing the Focus: How to Achieve More by Doing Less with Liz Hutson of EGH, LLC 2-1-25
Sat, 01 Feb 2025
In this episode, Liz Hutson, Principal Consultant and Owner at EGH, LLC, discusses the power of narrowing focus to achieve meaningful progress. She shares insights on overcoming “Quitter’s Day,” building momentum, and prioritizing effectively to create a more impactful and productive 2025.
Chapter 1: What is the significance of narrowing focus?
Hello and welcome to the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. My name is Chanel Bunger, and today I'm excited to speak with regular guest Liz Hudson, Principal Consultant and Owner at EGH LLC, who joins us today to discuss the topic, Narrowing the Focus. Liz, thank you as always for joining me. I'll have you take it away from here so you can share your insights with us.
Absolutely. Chanel, great to talk with you. We're sitting here at the middle of January, the beginning of 2025. And many of us, myself included, started the new year off with tons of ideas, energy, and just countless resolutions and goals. But oftentimes what happens, we burn out. And sometimes it takes a few days. Sometimes it takes a few weeks.
Chapter 2: What is Quitter's Day and why does it matter?
I just learned of this, and maybe I should have known this before, but there's actually a name for the day that this happens, believe it or not. it's the second Friday in January, they term it the Quitters Day. And this is the day that a lot of people give up on their resolution.
Chapter 3: Why do people lose motivation in January?
And as I think about it, you know, what, why is it that people quit on that day after, you know, just a few weeks earlier, being so excited about what they wanted to do? I think it's because we lose motivation, because we realize, the thing that we're trying to do is hard, right? It takes effort.
And the important thing, though, the thing that is actually really difficult is that we have too many things that we're trying to do. So I think one of the things that we can help with that in terms of keeping those goals alive is instead of quitting them, maybe it's time to work on narrowing the focus. And I think there's some ideas on how we make that happen or why this is important.
Chapter 4: How can narrowing focus lead to greater productivity?
And so those three ideas, we'll start with the first one is the reality is we can actually do a lot more with less. So when we reduce our list from 20 things or 25 things on there and just focus on one or two things, we can actually make some real progress. You know, I think when our energies are focused on just a couple few things, we can move those things along.
And even more and more studies, I'm just reading a book, just finished a book by Sanjay Gupta called Keep Sharp on Brain Health. And in that book and other studies that I've read as well, see more and more that multitasking is actually really not good for the brain. It affects negatively cognitive function, such as attention and memory and problem solving.
Chapter 5: What are the benefits of focusing on fewer tasks?
It just makes it difficult to focus on any single task and our productivity comes down. We have a lot more errors. So if we take all those different things and just say, I'm just going to work on one, maybe two things, we can actually do more with less. That's the first idea.
Got it. Got it. And what would you say the next step would be?
Chapter 6: How does achieving small wins build momentum?
Yeah. So I think that the important thing here is when we do more with less, the second thing that starts to happen is actually a great catalyst, a great fuel for what happens is when we knock that one thing off the list or two things off the list, that win builds momentum, both for yourself and for your team or other people that are watching. They're like, oh, that's really great.
I made some progress. It generates that momentum. And And when that momentum comes, we build confidence. Like, hey, I knocked that one thing off. I knocked that two things off. I'm ready to take on the next thing. And then that confidence takes us to number three and number four on the list.
And what we're seeing is that we're not only knocking off things one and two and three and four, but we're taking on harder things and we're successful with them because we have a confidence and a momentum that's built with that. And just that third idea is that, you know, it's not that when we take the 25 things and narrow it down to one or two, that the other things don't happen. That's not it.
We're just basically saying it doesn't come off the list. It's just down the list. Right. So we just prioritize it. We look and say, what is it that I need to do right now? What's my most important thing or what's maybe one of the easiest things to just get some momentum and feel good about this? However you want to pick what number one is going to be.
But we just take the other things and shift them to later. We're going to start to do things in series, not in parallel. And one of my favorite quotes, and I think it's so true when we talk about this as our own team and with our clients, is that, If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority, right?
So I think this is a good concept to understand and to really focus on and say we're just going to do a couple few things. One thing that we work with our clients on, especially as we're setting mission, vision, goals, objectives, and key results and things like that for the upcoming year or whatever it is that they're planning is, we love the book Measure What Matters by John Doerr.
And he talks about this idea of objectives and key results. And in there, he too, and that system really focuses on a couple of few things, right? Not a hundred things, but what are the one macro idea and maybe two, possibly three objectives that fall under that big umbrella, that key rallying cry. And then how do we measure that? How do we keep progress among those things?
And we do them in sprints. And I love that idea. I love that concept.
Love it. Well, Liz, I want to thank you for your time today. But before I let you go, is there anything else listeners should know?
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