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We treat focus as something you're either engaging in, or opting out of, but what if the truth points to focus as being something you've been trained out of by our attention economy?
David Epstein, author of Range and Inside the Box, breaks down what's actually happening inside the brain when we multitask, and why "just focusing" is a solution that doesn't hold up to reality.
Reclaiming our focus in an attention economy
As Herbert Simon said, in an information rich environment, there's a poverty of whatever it is that information consumes and that thing is attention. And I would say we are in a very information rich environment and so our attention is at risk. You can see this in all sorts of work like Gloria Mark who did incredible research on attention in people's workplaces. When she started about 20 years ago, the average worker switched screens about every two and a half minutes or so and then by about 2012 it was 75 seconds but later on it was down to about 45 seconds and that's where it stuck. So we switch screens about every 45 seconds and that turns out to be incredibly stressful. Like you can measure this in our immune systems, in our heart rate variability that the more often we're switching the higher our stress level is at the end of the day and the worse we are at the various tasks. Because multitasking it turns out is not actually possible. It's actually your brain dropping one set of rules essentially and having to activate another. But there's a residue left on the brain.
Brain residue
As Dr. Mark describes it, your brain is like a whiteboard and when you switch from one thing to another you erase the whiteboard but a residue stays on there and so the more times you do it during the course of the day the more residue there is and the harder it is for you to focus on any one particular thing. And so what are some of the recommendations? Well first of all batching your tasks. Dr. Mark found that people check email on average about 77 distinct times per day and that's a lot of multitasking. That's separate checks. That's not numbers of emails. And so instead you want to batch that email if you can. So you're you're doing a certain task at a certain time instead of toggling between many within one hour, maybe one hours for email and the next hours for something else so that you're not mixing them all together. And I would be really wary about starting your day in your inbox. I know that's the first instinct is to go check what's there but you want to be wary of something called the Zeigarnik effect, which is this psychological effect that unfinished tasks leave an imprint on your brain that takes some of your cognitive bandwidth until that loop is closed until it's finished. And because your inbox is probably a source of an unlimited number of unfinished things you might not want to be starting your day that way because you'll already be using up some of that cognitive bandwidth that you might want to focus for other projects. Doesn't mean you can't do your email but maybe shift it after you've done some of whatever the most important task for the day is. Another is that as you're multitasking attention is like a bucket and you want to take breaks before that bucket overflows or else it takes more time to recover. Maybe the thing that scared me the most in all of the research that I did for this book was Gloria Mark's research on self-interruption. That means thoughts that interrupt you when you're trying to focus and what she found was that we become accustomed to a certain level of distractions.
Distractions and focus
Let's say that's notifications from your phone or messages popping up or other people interrupting you eventually as if you have some kind of internal distractometer. You become accustomed to that rhythm and then if you put away all those distractions and silence your notifications and say now I'm going to focus you will simply self interrupt with intrusive thoughts at the same rate to which you've become accustomed. So you will not be able to say now I'm just going to focus. You will continue to interrupt yourself at that customary rhythm. If you're not structuring your focus then it will be co-opted and this is why it shows in studies of cognitive tests where if people have a phone visible even if it's off even if they can't use it or touch it. If it's visible it decreases their performance on the cognitive task and the more phone dependent they are the bigger that effect. So start by trying to put it out of the room when you really have to focus but try to alter your cadence of interruptions so that you can train your ability to focus for at least a half hour and an hour at a time here and there and finally do something called cognitive outsourcing. Put a notebook or a pad on your desk next to you and when some intrusive thought pops up about what you should be checking or what you didn't respond to write it down that's called cognitive outsourcing and it takes that intrusive thought out of your brain puts it somewhere else and improves your ability to focus on the task at hand. I think one of the big challenges with modern work is that it can become so amorphous especially if some of the time you work from home that it can kind of fill every gap in your life and that's not really great for your productivity or your your mental well-being and so we should set up structures around our work.
Both seasons humans are built for seasonality not doing the same thing every season and for cycling between times of hard work and times of rest as the music producer Rick Rubin has noted discipline and ritual is actually the structure that then allows people to do their best creative work that they don't want to be totally free in the rest of their life they want to be free within that box of discipline and ritual that liberates them to create and so one of the examples of this I love was the time I spent with the writer Isabel Allende who is one of the best-selling writers in history she's produced a best-selling book about every year and a half for the last 40 years 80 million copies in all when she's written about like in magazine features because she has magical realism and some of her writing she's written about often is if she is like a medium who's just these spirits are speaking through her and because her first book was called the house of the spirits but in reality when I spent time with her she thrives on this rigid ritual and structure and rhythm she starts every single book on January 8th and one of the reasons she does that is because then everyone in her life knows that they better get what they need from her by January 7th because then she's going to be out of touch she goes into a room where she feels her story lives she keeps it austere so there's not a lot of distractions she lights a candle to start her workday she blows it out at the end of the workday to signal the end of the day the turning off of her brain she closes the door she doesn't come back in until she starts the next day and she always comes back on January 8th even when she went through a personal tragedy with the death of her daughter at a young age and she said I don't know if I ever write again I lost the muse I didn't have the inspiration but January 8th rolled around and she said well I have to try because my rituals coming up and she did it again and got going again and wrote more bestsellers as she told me without this structure and this rhythm I could not do it so from the outside it seems that her creation is the story of boundless creativity but really it's one of boundaries that channel her focus that give her life seasonality and ritual that keep bringing her back and back and back and back again and empower her creativity rather than stifling it I myself as an independent writer in the 21st century have also had this experience of living with more freedom on autonomy than almost anyone in history but then I've had the experience of going back and putting some constraints in my life in place and those making me thrive in a way that total freedom absolutely did not when I started working on range I was working as an investigative reporter also at ProPublica but toward the end of the book I left that job because I wasn't gonna be able to finish the book I was thinking I'd go back but then the book kind of took on a life of its own and I went on my own and that was a dream in many ways because for years it had been my goal to get complete autonomy as a professional to be able to spend every minute of my day in the manner of my own choosing and so that's what I did I had total freedom fast forward about two years of that and I realized there is absolutely such a thing as too much autonomy my life became so atomized I had a million different competing priorities and I had no real ritual so my workday expanded to fit every moment that it possibly could I had no real seasonality in my life I had no structure I had no rhythm and I wasn't really singing up with other people either and I realized instead of doing that I actually needed to prioritize ruthlessly and focus on a smaller number of things have a workday that started and ended at a certain time have certain seasonality to my projects I needed grounding in my community so I joined the board of a nonprofit in my community an early childhood education center that serve families in need I started going to a shuffle dance meetups and classes so that I could have embodied experience with strangers on a regular basis so that I'm having this embodied experience with strangers that I want instead of living totally unto myself.