A Day Without Distraction: Lessons
Learned from 12 Hours of Forced Focus
What if you
had to focus for at least 30 minutes on every single task that you did? Would
it improve your productivity?
Here are the rules: All work must be done in blocks of at least 30
minutes. If I start editing a paper, for example, I have to spend at least 30
minutes editing. If I need to complete a small task, like handing in a form, I
have to spend at least 30 minutes doing small tasks. Crucially, checking email
and looking up information online count as small tasks. If I need to check my
inbox or grab a quick stat from the web, I have to spend at least 30 minutes
dedicated to similarly small diversions.
I followed these rules for one full work day. This post
describes why I did it and what I learned.
Continuous
Partial Attention
The motivation for my experiment should sound familiar. Over
the past half-decade, researchers have been sounding the alarm on the dangers
of multitasking. Gloria Mark, for example, a
professor at the University of California at Irvine, found that the technology workers she studied would make it,
on average, only 11 minutes into a project before being distracted. It then
took 25 minutes to return to the task post-distraction.
For some jobs, where responsiveness is crucial, this work
style might be necessary. But as an academic, I’m a to-do list creative — to keep my
job, I have to keep up with logistical tasks, but to advance, I need long bouts
of focus on hard problems. For a to-do list creative, ignoring the small stuff
isn’t an option, but living in a state of continuous partial attention (to
steal a phrase from Linda Stone) won’t cut it either.
The solution to this quandary is well-known by now:
batching.
Check email only a small number of
times per day! Work in big chunks without distraction!Everyone has heard
this suggestion. But almost no one follows it.
This is why I launched my experiment. I wanted to see what
would happen if I forced myself to batch.
Ignoring the small stuff isn’t an option, but living in a state of
continuous partial attention won’t cut it either.
A Day of
Forced Batching
I have a doctors appointment scheduled for 10 a.m., so I
decide to focus on a writing project from 8 to 10.
I feel the normal temptation to check my email while writing
— just in case — but my rules forbid it. Even a glance at my
inbox would trigger at least 30 minutes of similar small tasks.
When I arrive at my appointment at 10, I discover I had the
wrong time. The appointment is not until 11.
My rules force me to think in blocks of 30 minutes or more,
so I decide to spend from 10 to 10:30 contininuing work on my writing project
at a nearby library. Then, from 10:30 to 11:00, I do my first small tasks block
of the day. I have high hopes during this first small task block that I will
efficiently knock off many items from my logistical backlog. Instead, I end up
bogged down in my email inbox, trying to sort through who needs what and when.
After my appointment, I head home, go for a run, and make
myself lunch.
It’s now 1:30 and I’m in a tight spot. My goal for the
afternoon is to continue work on an important research problem. To do so, I
need to retrieve the latest draft of our write-up from my email. But this will
require a small task block of at least 30 minutes, so I have to be careful
about how and when I do this.
Even more tricky, I need to meet with my collaborator to
help work through some kinks in the research problem. On a normal day, I might
send him an email saying, “when can you meet?”, and then just keep my inbox
open until he responds. My rules, however, forbid this strategy (that is,
unless I want to dedicate my entire afternoon to checking my inbox and similar
small tasks).
I come up with the following solution:
I convert my commute from my apartment back to campus into a
small task block. That is, I will retrieve the write-up draft and check my
email right before I leave my apartment. I will think through my emails and how
to respond while traveling. Then when I arrive at my office, I’ll send off
those replies and shut down the small task block.
To handle my meeting dilemma, I send my collaborator an
email that reads: “During the following times this afternoon I’ll be working on
this project, if you happen to be free anytime in here, stop by my
office, otherwise tell me some times when we might meet tomorrow and I
will get back to you at the end of the day to fix one.” I’ve now freed
myself from needing to keep my inbox open during the afternoon.
From 2 to 5:30 I’m working on my research problem. The rules
remove any possibility of distraction — no matter how brief —
and this seems to improve my focus. “There’s a real sense of momentum here,” I
write in my notes.
At 5:30, I decide to do one final small task block to shut
down my day. I treat this like a challenge: how much can I squeeze into
one 30-minute block? The time constraint provides a certain urgency to
my actions usually lacking at 5:30 in the evening. I end up finishing my work
emails for the day, answering some blog reader emails, paying the rent,
approving a design concept, sending a message to a pair of old friends,
planning the next day, and recording the notes from this experiment.
In the end, the momentum carries me past 6:00 and I end up
finishing closer to 6:30. This is later than I normally like to work, but the
day ends with a satisfying feeling of accomplishment.
Conclusions
I’ll start with the negative aspects of
this experiment:
Batching, as it turns out, is hard.
It requires that you plan ahead to make sure you have the
material and information needed for focused blocks. It also requires careful
communication. Answering emails, for example, is complicated when you need those
emails to include all of the information needed for the next actions to be
taken. (It’s much easier to use email for informal back and forth
dialogue.) Because of this, tackling my inbox during the experiment was
surprisingly draining.
In other words, batching requires more work than not
batching. This is why, I now understand, most people are quick to abandon their
good-natured attempts to enforce more focus in their day: once it becomes
non-obvious how to continue, they toss the goal.
But then there are the positives:
Having a clear rule that forbids any distraction
during focused work was freeing. I still felt drawn toward diversion, but
knowing that acquiescence was not even a possibility reduced its urgency.
On the flip side, the percentage of time spent in a flow
state was as large as I’ve experienced in recent memory. I ended up spending
2.5 hours focused on my writing project and 3.5 hours focused on my research
paper. That’s six hours, in one day, of focused work with zero interruptions;
not even one quick glance at email.
At the same time, the careful pre-planning required to
satisfy my batching rules increased the efficiency of my small task completion.
Even though I dedicated 6 hours in one 10 hour work day to uninterrupted focus,
another 1.5 hours to exercise and eating, and another 1 hour to a doctors
appointment, I still managed to accomplish an impressive collection of
logistical tasks both urgent and non-urgent.
My bottom line:
To do batching right requires the type of strict rules I
deployed in my experiment. These rules, as I discovered, will absolutely make
your day more difficult. There’s no avoiding the reality that there will be
times when you have to take convoluted action to solve a problem that could so
easily be handled with just a quick bounce over to your inbox.
This is a pain in the ass.
At the same time, however, if you survive the annoyance,
there’s also no avoiding the reality that your work will be of a much higher
quality.
Ultimately, this is the batching trade-off: inconvenience in
your daily workflow in exchange for an increased quality of your work.
From my experience writing about productivity, most people
will abandon a tactic as soon as it makes their life more difficult. My
experience with batching, however, leads me to question whether we need to
rethink where we place our emphasis.
By Cal Newport
http://99u.com/articles/7032/a-day-without-distraction-lessons-learned-from-12-hrs-of-forced-focus?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=botw_07102016&utm_source=blueshift&utm_content=botw_sunday&bsft_eid=631b33fa-db4c-49f3-ba4c-6791b1b2417c&bsft_clkid=2f4e7e2c-58a4-4da9-a24a-2be0beac73af&bsft_uid=d4f9562c-4347-49cb-9544-373dd1f2b1f3
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