Work & Leadership

Your Productivity Problem Might Be Your Boss | Shawn Vanderhoven

Your productivity problem may not be yours. We treat focus like a matter of personal discipline: close Slack, block the calendar, stop checking email, and try harder. Shawn Vanderhoven’s research suggests something more uncomfortable.…

August 24, 2026Hosted by Eric PratumWith Shawn Vanderhoven

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Your productivity problem may not be yours.

We treat focus like a matter of personal discipline: close Slack, block the calendar, stop checking email, and try harder. Shawn Vanderhoven’s research suggests something more uncomfortable. Productivity is social. A workplace built around unclear priorities, hidden workloads, drive-by delegation, and constant interruptions can overwhelm even the most disciplined person.

In this episode, Eric talks with Shawn, a partner at The Wiseman Group and author of Pause: How to Lead Brilliant Work in a Busy World, written with Anne Vanderhoven.

Based on three years of research, Shawn explains what distinguishes leaders who create space for deep work from those who unintentionally destroy it. The best leaders slow things down just long enough to clarify priorities, reveal the work nobody is discussing, remove distractions, and then accelerate on what matters.

Eric and Shawn discuss why personal productivity systems fail inside distracted teams, how unclear priorities contribute to employee dissatisfaction and turnover, and why a seemingly five-minute request can derail someone’s entire day.

They also examine how employees can “pause up” when their boss is creating the distraction, why good delegation begins with understanding what someone is already carrying, and how leaders can notice struggle before losing talented people.

Finally, they consider what AI does to deep work. Faster tools can tempt people to accept more projects and encourage leaders to assume that everything should happen faster. Shawn argues that using AI well may actually require more protected thinking time, not less.

The central takeaway: prioritization is not simply identifying the most important thing. It is deciding what you will make most important and accepting what that decision costs.

Questions answered