Signal, clarity, focus seems ever harder to achieve in our noisy world. It's not that it was ever easy before, but our technology invites more information to process and parse, more choices, and more opportunities both wanted and unwanted.
How, then, can we find the state of focus that we do want, and eliminate distractions that we don't want?
Semantics
The etymology of focus and distraction has some starting places. "Focus" actually has a long history of meaning "fireplace" or even "home, family" in a figurative sense.
Eventually, "focus" came to embody the sense of "convergence," which is the opposite of our other word, "distract," which is a divergence.
In other words, focus is coming together while distraction is moving apart or separating.
Even more instructive is looking at how a distraction is described in this entry from Etymonline: "to throw into a state of mind in which one knows not how to act, cause distraction in, confuse by diverse or opposing considerations."
I think that's a key to finding our focus: limiting our choices.
If distraction can be caused by "diverse or opposing considerations," then we have to cut out options.
There's actually some related psychology to this in marketing and sales: the Pricing Page.
The Psychology of Choice
If you've ever gone to a website that you're considering to buy some service from (streaming, software, consulting, design, etc.), you've likely gone to the pricing page to see what it costs.
Wise companies will have a clear offering, usually broken into a few tiers of options—"few" being the key word. The more of these tiers or packages, the less likely you are to make the decision to buy.
We love to have choices available to us—have you ever gone into a Walmart just to look at stuff? Window shopping at a mall? Amazon.com browsing? It's fun to see and consider many options, but the downside is that it makes the final decision so much harder to reach.
Choice overload is the easiest way to prevent yourself from taking action or concentrating your energy and focus.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
If companies increase sales by reducing their product options, we can take their strategy and apply it to our work, too, right?
Many productivity "experts" like to flaunt the idea that saying, "No," is the simple solution to better focus. If you say, "Yes," to something, you're also saying, "No," to something else due to resource restraints (time, energy, etc.)
Therefore, just say, "No," more often to conserve as much as possible until there's an opportunity too good to pass up.
Sounds easy, makes sense, but it's extremely difficult to do in the average 9-5 job.
After all, most jobs are a contract that takes autonomy out of the equation. You can't just say, "No," to your boss...without consequence.
Obviously, there are still ways around this—it's not like you can't negotiate, persuade, or demonstrate better projects, workloads, and conditions. "No," sounds harsh, but you can still say it with skillful wordsmithing.
Beyond that, though, I have found in my own experimentation with managers at work that a lot of what feels like immovable demands from our bosses are actually much more flexible and amorphous.
I have been asked many times to do preposterous things. For example, a company I worked with wanted to have a video play in an email. This is not possible to do without opening a browser window (and for good reasons like security, storage size, etc.)
If the requester had even thought about their request for 30 seconds, they would have realized that:
- they had never actually had this experience before and...
- they couldn't possibly expect a low-level junior dev would be able to magically conjure the ability to do so.
Instead of just saying, "No," we added a few options for them to pick so that they still accomplished the ultimate end of their request (to disseminate this video).
We ended up simply including an image of the video thumbnail that enticed people to click, which opened the video in their browser on YouTube.
This actually reduced the choices I had to make and put the decision-making back on the stakeholder (which they tend to like, by the way). Instead of spending hours researching, experimenting, and turning up a failure, the distraction-project was recycled into something easily accomplished by the email marketer—no dev even needed.
The key here is to get creative with your distractions that are from other people. Many times we have people requesting things of us that we've already solved for: Reuse those solutions—even the persuasive techniques. Or perhaps the request itself is impossible: Recycle it by melting it down to its essence and re-creating it in a way that still accomplishes the spirit of the request. These are ways I've been able to chip away at distracting work.
Sometimes requesters will become educated enough through your efforts that they'll be able to solve similar problems again on their own.
For the Other Distractions...
The majority of our perceived, unwanted distractions is probably coming from our technology. The people-based distractions from the previous section are a hefty part of all of our distractions, but it doesn't feel like the kind of distraction we get from our devices.
Maybe that's because we do generally like helping people, so when they ask for help, it's a distraction that is worth the cost.
Notifications, doom-scrolling, and dopamine-hacking digital experiences have a less amicable feel. They are distractions that cost us our attention—and it's attention spent not on human interaction and altruism, but technically it's just to the benefit of companies and cheap entertainment for ourselves.
It's a problem much more difficult to investigate and resolve—after all, it's you against an entire corporation with years of research and development designing an experience that you just can't fully pull away from.
Cutting Notifications
Notifications easily meet the distraction criteria of: "[throwing] into a state of mind in which one knows not how to act." The gravitational pull towards the apps or programs with the little red dots can be nigh impossible to resist.
Even the wood-block sound of a Slack message is enough to divert my attention until it's been resolved.
Each notification is like a fly buzzing near your head. You're suddenly aware of its presence and if you wait too long, more insects come. The only way to exterminate these bothersome bugs is to switch tasks and open each app.
This can either make it harder to get back on track, or, even more interesting, elevate your stress to the point of hurting productivity. My wife ghost-wrote an article for my blog, exploring the unexpected cost of interruptions:
"Studies like, “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress,” have been done to determine what the actual disruption cost is for things like messaging apps with their potential for almost constant notifications."
"Often we would think the disruptions would lead to the slowing down of response or completion time for whatever we were working on before we were interrupted. Surprisingly, that wasn’t the case. In fact, the job or work was completed more quickly after an interruption. However, the mental workload, stress, and feelings of pressure were significantly higher. So while we may not be losing time with each interruption, the feelings of stress and pressure and the increased mental workload have a negative impact on most employees..."
I still don't have a great solution to the instant-messaging software at work. It's also going to vary for different roles. I actually try to respond quite quickly to every message that comes in—mostly to clear my queue in a sense. This absolutely comes at a cost of task-switching, stress, and that pressure to be always-on, always-available.
However, cutting notifications from other apps helps balance this out if nothing else.
I allow other means of communication like email and task management apps to build up over a few hours. Then I can tackle them all in one sitting two-three times a day or even just a few times a week depending on how often a communication venue is used in the company culture.
Audit
We've discussed a lot about distractions and there's still more to look at for improving focus.
I'm going to split this into another issue of CYBORG_ for next week. For now, though, we have some things to work on:
- What are our distractions?
- Where can we cut these distractions or reduce the amount of them?
- How many notifications can you turn off? Are there any apps that you can mute entirely?
-
Especially consider the prevalence of choice overload:
- What choices have you been stuck on?
- What choices have no real relevance in your life that you can get rid of?
- Are there choices that you decide on frequently that could be automated or have a default decision that you can commit to?