In a World of Distraction, Focus is Your Superpower
I have a theory about 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. As Nicholas Carr points out in The Shallows, this is the death of deep, focused thinking.
Fighting the Tide of Distraction
I believe that those who consciously choose to fight against the tide of digital distraction will wield a tremendously powerful and unique skill in a world increasingly devoid of deep, reflective thought.
Focused thought is what allows us to gain new insights, find creative solutions, increase empathy, maintain balanced perspectives, and achieve that rewarding state of work we often call ‘flow.’
So how can we become those people?
Reclaiming Focus
Control Your Email
If you can, 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 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 Surfing Sinkhole
The internet, and especially platforms like Google, are 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 of clickbait.
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 blog post, then check your bank account, respond to an email, browse Facebook, and then go back to the blog post.
Switch-tasking is incredibly counterproductive. Avoid it as much as possible and focus on doing one thing at a time.
Manage Your Notifications
I’ve been slowly whittling away at my notifications over time. I no longer allow my phone to buzz when it’s on silent—I find that just as distracting as sound. I’ve turned off sound notifications for text messages and calls most of the time. I’ve disabled all notification badges on my phone screen except for direct Facebook messages. And you know what? I haven’t missed any of them.
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
In their book The Hyperlinked Life, David Kinnaman and Jun Young kept a log of how often they checked their phones in a day. They found that between email, texts, searches, news, social media, and more, they each reached for their phones over a hundred times daily.
And that’s conservative. A study in the UK found that the average smartphone user checks their phone 221 times a day. That means we’re distracting ourselves every 4.3 minutes!
How can we expect to maintain any meaningful focus when we sabotage ourselves every few minutes? Another study found that the average user touches their phone 2,617 times daily—a figure that jumps to 5,427 for heavy users.
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.