This exclusive interview with Dr James Hewitt was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.
Meetings, messages and constant task-switching can consume a working day while important decisions and deep work remain untouched. Under sustained pressure, judgement, communication and performance can deteriorate rapidly.
Dr James Hewitt is a peak performance speaker and human performance scientist with a PhD from Loughborough University. He previously served as Chief Innovation Officer for the coaching company behind 19 Formula 1 World Championships and continues to work with F1 teams and elite performers. Champions Speakers
In this exclusive interview with the Inspirational Leadership Speakers Agency, James explains why effort alone cannot sustain high performance, how fragmented attention damages productivity and which workplace habits prevent teams from doing their best work.
Q1. Why is working harder no longer a reliable route to high performance?
Dr James Hewitt: “The biggest misunderstanding is that high performance is always about more effort. Leaders assume that if people work harder, care more and dig deeper, results will inevitably follow.
“I understand why they believe that because it used to be partly true. In industrial and factory work, more hours generally equalled more output. Even in some areas of knowledge work, spending longer at your desk led to better results.
“Knowledge work has changed profoundly. The product today is the quality of our thinking: our decisions, judgement, ability to read a room and capacity to spot a risk that has not appeared on a spreadsheet yet.
“Those capabilities degrade under sustained high load. They do not always become gradually worse. Sometimes they fall off a cliff. It is like a bridge that looks fine until the moment it collapses.
“I saw this vividly in Formula 1. I spent years as Chief Innovation Officer for the coaching company behind 19 Formula 1 World Championships, working with teams where decisions made in fractions of a second can win or lose races.
“The best-performing teams are not always operating at 100% effort. They manage their cognitive resources intelligently.
“I saw this with Daniel Ricciardo at the 2016 Monaco Grand Prix, where he secured his first pole position. Monaco is such a tight circuit that qualifying on pole makes it your race to lose.
“His team, Red Bull, had practised the pit-stop tyre change thousands of times and performed it flawlessly in rehearsal. Under race pressure and changing conditions, the system fell apart. A pit stop that should have taken around two and a half seconds lasted more than 13 seconds. Miscommunication and a fumble with the tyres cost him the race win.
“That was a pressure problem. Teams often fail to train for those moments.
“I see the same thing in boardrooms. Brilliant people perform beautifully in planning sessions, then fall apart during a Q&A, freeze when a client pushes back or make terrible decisions at 4pm on a Thursday because their brain has been switching all day.
“Most teams do not fail because they lack talent or effort. They struggle because pressure changes how we think, decide and communicate, and most people have not been trained for those moments.”
Q2. How has fragmented attention become a greater constraint on productivity than time?
Dr James Hewitt: “I often ask audiences whether they have finished a full day at work and thought: “I was busy the whole time, so why do I feel like I have not moved any of my important work forward?”
“Most hands go up. We have become incredibly efficient at being busy. We have more time-management tools than any generation in history, yet our feeling of meaningful progress is declining.
“We do not have a time problem. We have an attention problem.
“Imagine attention as a spotlight. The question is whether that spotlight is pointing at the right thing, at the right time and with the right intensity.
“During the average working day, it bounces between emails, messages and people asking, “Have you got a minute?” We can fill an entire day without completing a single piece of deep, consequential thinking.
“The neuroscience is brutal. Every time we switch contexts or tasks, the brain must dump one mental workspace, load another, then reconfigure and reorientate.
“Some research indicates that it can take about 23 minutes to get back up to speed on the original task after switching. Other research suggests that people are interrupted and forced to switch tasks more than 200 times a day. We are spending more time recovering from interruptions than doing the work they interrupted.
“I sometimes use live brain monitoring in my keynotes. An EEG headset measures brain activity in real time. I have used this neurotechnology with Formula 1 teams and elite athletes.
“When I distract someone wearing the headset, we can see the spike in their cognitive load, the decrease in their attention metrics and the activation of their stress response. It is visible and measurable. The same process is happening within teams hundreds of times every day.
“Research suggests that redesigning knowledge work to facilitate focus could be worth about $468 billion a year across just five sectors of the US economy. Globally, the value runs into billions.
“Leaders often tell me their people need better time management. Their people can probably manage their time perfectly well. They need an environment that protects their most valuable resource: their attention. That is what makes their best work possible.”
Q3. Which workplace habits cause the greatest damage to focus in otherwise high-performing teams?
Dr James Hewitt: “The answer is hiding in plain sight. Small habits go unquestioned because people accept them as the way the organisation works.
“The first is what I call “meeting creep”. Someone books a 30-minute meeting and it runs for 45 minutes. Another meeting follows, and soon the calendar becomes a solid wall of back-to-back calls with no time to think or take a break.
“Leaders then wonder why their strategic plan has not moved in three months. You cannot think strategically during the two minutes between a budget review and a client escalation.
“The second issue is false urgency culture, particularly around email. We treat email like instant messaging. When every message appears to require an immediate response, nothing is truly urgent, but everything feels urgent.
“Some data indicates that 84% of us keep our email inboxes open in the background at all times. The average email is read, and sometimes answered, within minutes of arriving. We convince ourselves that this is productivity, but constant responsiveness erodes our attention.
“I call it “productivity theatre”. People feel they must look busy by responding immediately instead of focusing on work that produces genuine value.
“The third damaging norm is rewarding presence over output. The person who arrives first and leaves last often gains a reputation as a high performer, even if half of their day is spent on low-value activity. Someone who works with focus for six hours and produces outstanding results gets questioned for leaving at 5pm.
“Formula 1 does not confuse being busy with performing well because the data is clear. A pit stop either takes two and a half seconds or 13 seconds. Nobody cares how hard you appeared to try.
“Businesses need to become more honest about the difference between activity and output.
“The solution can begin with simple team norms. Give people meeting-free blocks for focused work and agree reasonable response windows.
“One company I worked with added its email-checking times to staff email signatures. Employees checked their messages during five blocks throughout the day. They also gave people a phone number or WhatsApp contact for genuinely urgent matters.
“Many emails were never sent because of that change. The team saved more than an hour per person each day through a series of communication-efficiency techniques.
“Some data indicates that when we work without interruption, we are around 30% faster and experience less stress. Protecting time for deep focus can reclaim hundreds of hours each year, but somebody must name the problem first.”
