In a World of Distraction, Focus is Your Superpower

I have a theory that in the future, there will be two types of people. Those who can focus, and those who can’t.

The reason is simple. We’re drowning in distraction, and distraction is toxic to focus.

The Danger of Distraction

The first danger of distraction is that we vastly underestimate both how often we experience it and its impact on our mental state.

David Rock, in Your Brain at Work, highlights this when he says,

“Employees spent an average of 11 minutes on a project before being distracted. After an interruption, it takes them 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they do at all.... By the time you get back to where you were, your ability to stay focused goes down even further as you have even less glucose available now. Change focus ten times an hour (one study showed people in offices did so as much as 20 times an hour), and your productive thinking time is only a fraction of what’s possible.”

Studies have shown that when people are asked how often they check their emails, they consistently underestimate both the frequency and the impact of these interruptions.

Pico Iyer, in his book The Art of Stillness, puts it bluntly:

“Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes—which means we’re never caught up with our lives.”

All of this leads to a devastating impact on our ability to focus.

“Psychological research has long confirmed what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and leave us feeling tense and anxious.” - Nicholas Carr, ‘The Shallows’.

Fighting the Tide of Distraction

I believe that those who consciously determine to fight the tide of social conditioning that urges us every second of every day to accept the onslaught of digital distractions will wield a tremendously powerful, unique skill in a world increasingly devoid of deep, reflective, focused thought.

Focused thought is what makes possible new insights, creative solutions, increased empathy, balanced perspective, and that wonderfully rewarding state of work and mind we sometimes call ‘flow’.

So how can we become those people?

Reclaiming Focus

Control Your Email

If it is at all within your authority and feasible within your role, try not to have your email notifications always on. Every time you get a preview of a new email, a part of your brain has to stop what you’re doing, decide whether to open it, and then - whether you do or not - work to reclaim the focus you had just a moment before.

A better approach, if you can, is to batch your email checks at specific times during the day, or at least only have notifications on when you’re doing low-brainpower tasks.

Avoid the Scrolling Sinkhole

Much of the internet is designed to profit from your distraction. Their business models depend on keeping you clicking, moving from one thing to the next, without ever stopping to focus deeply on anything. Be aware of this, and resist the temptation to fall into the sinkhole.

Understand Multi-tasking vs. Switch-tasking

True multi-tasking is like watching TV while ironing - you can do both at once. But what we often call multi-tasking is really switch-tasking, like when you’re writing a document, then check your bank account, respond to an email, browse social media, and then go back to the document.

Multi-tasking is when you can, in fact, do two things simultaneously. Mostly, though, what we call multi-tasking is in fact switch-tasking, and it is completely counterproductive to true productivity and focus. Avoid it as much as possible.

Manage Your Notifications

You know about this. We all know about this. A regular review of what you’re allowing to interrupt you regardless of what you’re doing is a worthwhile routine, especially bearing in mind the science of the true cost of recovering focus after a distraction.

Start experimenting. You don’t need to be ready to respond to every ping across the dozen platforms that compete for your attention. Protect your focus and your ability to do your best work.

Stop Reaching for Your Phone

There are a variety of stats about how often we reach for our phones, and how much time we spend on them. There’s a pretty clear theme though - it’s a lot, and it’s more than we think.

How can we expect to maintain any meaningful focus when we sabotage ourselves every few minutes?

The Cost of Distraction

If we want to live our most deliberate lives, think our best thoughts, create our best work, and execute our best strategies, we must resist distraction’s quiet erosion of focus.

In a world full of distractions, focus is a superpower. Choose to stand out by choosing to focus.