The Busiest Tour Operators Aren't Always the Most Productive
This is part four of our Productivity Playbook series. Watch the full series here and read part one here.
Here’s something uncomfortable: you can work a full 10-hour day and accomplish almost nothing meaningful.
Not because you’re lazy. Not because you don’t care. But because you spent the entire day bouncing between emails, Slack messages, Instagram posts, and scheduling tasks. At the end of it, you can list everything you did, but none of it actually moved your business forward in a significant way.
We were busy. But we weren’t productive. And there’s a big difference.
Shallow Work vs. Deep Work
Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, wrote a book called Deep Work that breaks this problem down clearly. He separates your workday into two categories: shallow work and deep work.
Shallow work is the logistical stuff. Answering emails, responding to messages, posting on social media, updating an OTA listing. It doesn’t require much brainpower, and with a little training, someone else could handle most of it.
Deep work is different. It’s cognitively demanding. It requires sustained concentration. And it produces outcomes that actually push your business forward.
For tour operators, deep work looks like finding new distribution channels, reworking your pricing to get the margins you need, building systems so you’re not a bottleneck, or recruiting and training the team that will allow your business to grow at a pace that matches your goals.
This is the kind of work that creates leverage. And it cannot be done in five-minute windows between interruptions.
Why We Default to Shallow Work
The trap Newport calls out is that shallow work feels productive. You clear your inbox. You respond to 15 messages. You update a listing. At the end of the day, you can point to everything you did.
But none of it was impactful.
We default to shallow work because it’s easy, it’s safe, and the risk of failure is low. Deep work is the opposite. It’s uncomfortable. The outcome can be uncertain. You might spend 90 minutes on something and realize it’s not working, and that can feel like failure.
So we avoid it. We tell ourselves we’ll get to the important stuff once we clear the decks. But as many of us know, those decks never get cleared. There’s always another email, another notification, another small fire.
The Real Cost of Context Switching
Newport also studied a concept called context switching, and the research behind it is worth paying attention to.
Sophie Leroy at the University of Washington found something she calls “attention residue.” When you switch from Task A to Task B, part of your attention stays stuck on Task A. Your brain doesn’t fully transition.
So when you check your email in the middle of writing a tour description, you’re not just losing the 30 seconds it takes to read and reply. You’re losing the 10 to 15 minutes it takes to get back into focused concentration.
A day full of shallow work leaves you exhausted and unsatisfied because you never actually got deep into anything. You just bounced between surfaces all day.
Newport puts it bluntly: if you’re constantly context switching, you’re training your brain to be unable to focus. The more you feed it distraction, the harder it becomes to concentrate when you need to.
Three Ways to Create the Conditions for Deep Work
So what do we do instead? Here are three recommendations straight from Newport’s framework.
Schedule 90-minute focus blocks. This isn’t “try to focus for a while.” This is a meeting with yourself that you treat as seriously as a meeting with a VIP client or partner. Block it on your calendar, close your email, silence your phone, and work on one thing for the full 90 minutes.
Why 90 minutes? That’s roughly one ultradian cycle, a natural rhythm of high concentration your brain can sustain before needing a break. Longer than that, and diminishing returns start to kick in.
Kill notifications. Not “try to ignore them.” Actually go into your phone and turn them off. Every ping, buzz, and banner is someone else’s agenda hijacking your attention. During your focus block, your phone should be in another room or at a minimum face down in Do Not Disturb mode with only emergency contacts allowed through.
Most of us check our phones not because something important happened, but out of habit. Break that habit during your focus time. You can also install browser extensions that block your go-to distraction sites during work sessions.
Try productive meditation. This is Newport’s term for using physical activity to think through a specific problem. Go for a walk without a podcast, without your phone, and just think about one challenge you’re trying to solve. Let your mind work on it without additional input.
Steve Jobs famously got some of his best ideas from walks. Our brains process things differently when we’re not consuming information.
“But I Run a Tour Business. I Can’t Disappear for 90 Minutes.”
Fair point. But let me push back: How much of what feels urgent is actually urgent?
A lot of guest questions can wait 90 minutes. Most guide issues can wait an hour. Most emails can definitely wait an hour.
The problem is you’ve trained everyone, including yourself, to expect instant responses. That’s a pattern, not a necessity. And patterns can be changed.
Start small. One 90-minute block, two or three times a week. Early morning works best for most operators, before the day’s fires start. Let your team know you’ll be unavailable during those windows and give them a way to reach you for true emergencies.
You might be surprised how few emergencies actually happen. We’ve seen it over and over with the tour operators we coach: a protected 90-minute block can produce more progress than an entire distracted day.
Turn This Into Action
First, schedule at least one 90-minute focus block in the next seven days. Put it on your calendar right now and treat it like an appointment you can’t cancel.
Second, before that block starts, decide on the one thing you’ll work on. Not three things. One. Your most important, highest-leverage task.
Third, during that block, go fully dark. Phone in another room, Do Not Disturb on everything, notifications off. See what happens when you give something your complete attention.
One of the biggest takeaways from Newport’s work is that focus can be a genuine competitive advantage. The ability to tune out distractions and bring some discipline to your attention serves you in business and in life, whether that’s being more productive at work or being truly present with your family.
If you’d like help figuring out what those highest-leverage tasks actually are for your tour business, we’d love to chat. Book a free strategy call with one of our Guest Focus coaches at guestfocus.com/call.
