The Focus Fix: A practical system to reclaim your attention and finish what matters

John W Gray is a writer, speaker, and workplace attention strategist who helps chronically distracted professionals reclaim their focus — not through iron willpower, but through routines they can actually keep. For more than a decade, he worked in high-pressure agency and marketing roles where his calendar, inbox, and notifications ran his days. He was, by his own admission, the kind of professional this book was written for: productive on the surface, scattered underneath, and perpetually failing to finish the work he cared about most.

After a period of near-burnout, Gray began a personal experiment in attention. He tracked his time and energy honestly, read widely across psychology and productivity research, and started testing a set of routines designed to protect focus rather than demand discipline. The routines worked for him — and, more tellingly, they worked for the hundreds of professionals he began coaching. *The Focus Fix* is the result of that process: a practical system refined through years of workshops, client engagements, and his own imperfect but persistent practice.

Today, Gray advises teams and executives on sustainable attention practices, speaks on focus and the future of work, and writes on attention for business publications. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his family, where he protects his own morning writing block with the same seriousness he recommends in these pages — and keeps an analog notebook for the ideas his phone is not allowed to interrupt.