#006 Attending to our attention
Our ability to pay attention impacts our wellbeing (and our entire lives).
When was the last time you really paid attention? When your played lego with your kids this morning, were you fully present? Or did you check your phone every couple of minutes?
What about when you washed the dishes? Did you notice the temperature of the water, the sensation of the sponge as your hands swished through the water to wash a plate? Or were you mentally churning through your to-do list?
And what about at work? Did you spend time focused on a single task? Or did you jump between email, teams messages and social media for most of the day?
Continuing on our mindfulness theme for May (can’t promise it is limited to only this month though – that is how important it is to our individual and collective wellbeing!), this week we zoom in on attention, why we find it hard to pay attention, and why training ourselves (and our younger generations) to attend to our attention has massive economic and social implications, both for ourselves as individuals and households, as well as on a much broader scale – in our communities, in Australia, and all over the world. This is such a big topic that I am going to split it over a couple of weeks. This week I focus on the work/economic side of the equation and next week more on the social impact of attention.
The myth of multitasking
Remember when it was a badge of honour to be a multitasker (maybe it still is for you!), to be able to juggle multiple projects at work, attend all the meetings, answer all the emails, and then go home and start the second shift, which looks different for everyone but could involve unpaid care work for children or elderly parents, household chores, second paid jobs, or overtime. We thought we could handle thinking about 5 or 6 things at once. We could make dinner, reply to an email, help kids with homework and put a load of washing on, no problems.
Turns out our brains are not built for multitasking. In Johann Hari’s excellent book Stolen Focus he interviews Professor Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who says “your brain can only produce one or two thoughts in your conscious mind at once.” You might think you are doing more, but when this happens you are actually ‘juggling’ or switching back and forth. He argues that there are three ways in which this constant switching degrades your ability to focus.
First is the ‘switch cost’ effect. Evidence shows that if you are focused on one task, say writing a briefing note or doing your tax and your phone pings with a text, you are slower to refocus on your original task. Studies show that this impact is quite large. One study found ‘technological distraction’ (ie getting emails and phone calls) caused a drop in workers’ IQ by an average of 10 points. Hari puts this into context by pointing out that this is double the “knock to your IQ when you smoke cannabis…in terms of getting your work done, you are better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your text messages and Facebook a lot.”
The second effect of multitasking is more errors. Instead of spending time thinking deeply, your thinking is more superficial because you spend a lot of time correcting errors and going back over old work when don’t focus on one task without distraction.
The third cost is a longer-term effect and is linked to lost creativity. New thoughts and innovation come from your brain shaping new connections out of what you have seen and heard or learned. Miller said “Your mind, given free undistracted time, will automatically think back over everything it absorbed, and start to draw links between them in new ways. This takes place beneath the level of your conscious mind.”
Does this resonate with your experience of modern work? Research shows that the average American worker is distracted once every three minutes. Other studies show that workers are almost constantly being interrupted and switching between tasks. “The average office worker now spends 40 per cent of their work time wrongly believing they are multitasking – which means they are incurring all of the costs for their attention and focus”.
There are obviously huge economic costs to our modern work culture, which reveres a multitasker and reviles single taskers. If you are a knowledge worker and have ever had a job interview, undoubtedly you have been asked “Tell me about a time when you successfully managed competing priorities?” The next time I am asked this question I am definitely going to toot my reformed multitasker horn and spout the joys and benefits of single tasking. It’s time for a revolution!
Deep Work
With ChatGPT and other generative AI tools now able to write text in seconds, what does the knowledge worker have left? One of the key things is our ability to knit together complex ideas and draw connections to make sense of the world. If we lose this, we lose a huge advantage in the work place.
Cal Newport writes a lot about the benefits of ‘deep work’. His hypothesis is
The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
Newport is a huge advocate for carving out time for ‘deep work’ (usually around 2-4 hours a day of cognitively demanding, single tasking work is all the brain can handle) and leaving time for the brain to make the connections that Miller talked about above. Equally important to carving out deep work is giving our brain a rest or a ‘shutdown’ every day.
Newport argues that there are 3 key reasons why having a ‘shut down’ period in every work day is “profitable to your ability to produce valuable output”.
1. Downtime aids insights
o Providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through complex challenges. Have your best ideas come to you on a run or in the shower? This is why.
2. Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply
o Spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.
o Having a casual conversation with a friend, listening to music while making dinner, playing a game with your kids, going for a run (all enforcing a work shutdown) – play the same attention restoring role as walking in nature.
3. The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important
o Research shows that your capacity for deep work in a given day is limited. If you are careful about your schedule, you should hit your daily deep work capacity during your workday. Any work you do at night won’t be the high-value activity that can advance your career, but likely to be low-value shallow work (like responding to emails etc).
This post could be another 50 pages long covering all of the research into our ability to pay attention, worker happiness, productivity, and links to innovation and creativity (see list of further reading below if this has sparked inspiration to become a single-tasking, deep work convert).
So what can we do? Like any successful habit, there are lots of small things that you can stack together to make big change to your wellbeing and your performance at work.
Here are 5 key ways you can attend to your attention at work in this week’s Modern Experiment in Wellbeing. I started doing all of these things as part of my commitment to deep work about 4 years ago. I don’t do them all the time, but I am very aware of when I don’t do it (and am definitely not as productive!)
1. Turn off all pop-up email notifications and sounds on your computer. Even if you don’t check your email, a pop-up in the corner of your screen is still a big distraction and adds to your cognitive switching load.
2. Schedule emails. Most people don’t need to check their emails every 10 minutes (or every 3 minutes!!). Yet we do… So set a time in the morning, after lunch and at the end of the day to check and respond to email. If you are a manager, give ‘permission’ to your team to do this.
3. Use the Forest app to keep on track. Similar to the Pomodoro technique (which got me through writing my PhD thesis), Forest allows you to set a timer of 25 minutes (or the time of your choice) and plant a tree in your ‘forest’. If you pick up your phone to email or for an idle scroll of social media during this time your tree will ‘die’. It is interesting to see how often when we are doing cognitively demanding work, that we want to pick up our phone for a mindless scroll. Forest is good to help you stay on track (and pay attention to your brain’s desire to be distracted!).
4. Do your cognitively demanding work in the morning. Most of us work best first thing in the morning, when our brains are well rested (but this can depend on your chronotype – do this quiz to find out when you work best). Try to schedule your day to allow a couple of uninterrupted hours at your peak deep work time.
5. Put your phone down. A lot of our multitasking is aided by our smartphones. We can order groceries while on a Zoom meeting, scroll social media while waiting in line for a coffee, or read the news while our children are vying for our attention. So this week leave your phone in your bag or out of sight when you can.
Wait in line for coffee and notice what is going on around you. Play lego for 15 minutes while fully present. Watch tv without scrolling through social media at the same time.
Notice the discomfort.
Notice how you use your phone as a source of distraction.
Perhaps set up the screen time feature on your phone so you know how much time you spend each day. If it says 3 or 4 hours, just remember that it is not only 3 or 4 hours, it is much more when you add the ‘switch cost’ effect to the tally, you are losing hours more in lost focus.
Bonus – the culture around multitasking as a huge barrier to many of us changing our work habits. Perhaps you can use this newsletter as a way to start a conversation in your workplace (or with your teenagers!). A lot of people might need convincing that single-tasking is the new multitasking – and there is a tonne of research to prove it!
I remember reading Cal Newport’s book Deep Work in 2018 and being lit on fire – I immediately went to my boss and asked to present a session on it at our next planning day. As a result we got rid of a tonne of emails and had a 10 minute stand-up meeting every morning, and we had signs made to indicate when we were in ‘deep work’ and not to be interrupted.
I am looking forward to continuing the focus on attention next week!
Be well
Alicia
Further reading and listening
Johann Hari – Stolen Focus: Why you can’t pay attention (Book)
Johann Hari – “You attention didn’t collapse, it was stolen” (The Guardian)
Podcast – Johann Hari (The Imperfects)
Review of Stolen Focus – “Why can’t we pay attention anymore” (New York Times)
Cal Newport – Deep Work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world (Book)
Cal Newport – A World Without Email – Reimagining Work in the Age of Overload (Book)
Cal Newport - “Email is making us miserable”(The New Yorker)
Podcast – Cal Newport on Digital Minimalism (The Rich Roll Podcast)