TL;DR! It’s profoundly ironic that our undoing isn’t the complexity of our time, but our inability to master even one moment of it.
I kept a distraction ticker while writing this post, and the outcome quite frankly frightened me. Writing these 460 words involved over 130 distractions and interruptions, spreading it over 5 sessions. Having rehabilitated from ADD already once in my life, this is not good. However, this is largely symptomatic of our times and habits. It’s a miracle anyone gets anything done anymore. The jury’s out on whether the next generations will be better at focusing, but from the echoes that we hear from teachers, a childhood filled with an endless, addictive stream of super-sensory stimuli doesn’t seem to do any favours either.
Prof. Cal Newport has made numerous painfully sharp realisations of our age of digital distractions. One of his main points is the need for what he calls deep work. This is work that happens in a prolonged state of concentration; it takes a long while to get started and can only happen uninterrupted. Newport describes this as the prerequisite of high-quality information work, and the ability to engage in it as one of the key criteria for a successful information worker – and organisation. Newport posits that the value created in a modern organisation is basically the integral of sustained attention over time (which he refers to as the Attention Capital Theory).
I didn’t really grasp how important – and refreshing deep work can be before I started working on projects with a level of complexity. I worked in an environment that was rich with geeky introverts where most tasks could be carried out with very little external input – and even most of that was handled with Slack messages to people within 10 meters.
In this kind of environment, work easily becomes sequential instead of semi-random multitasking. Things happen on schedule. Even interruptions happen mostly on schedule. No one else has the permission to make reservations in your calendar. Eventually you only stress constructively about solving the challenges at hand and wrangling the complexity on schedule. You cease stressing about having a dozens irrelevant but important things to do at once. Your productivity skyrockets, your blood pressure drops, and your ability to stretch your capabilities grows immensely.
Instead of TL;DRs, executive summaries, gamification and super-sensory media, I’ve come to believe Newport’s digital minimalism is the antidote to the mental poison of our time. We need to realise that in a world of excess, we’re never going to get anything done if we don’t focus on one thing intensely at a time. And usually, those few things are what ca lead us to greatness
If you want to read more, Prof. Cal Newport also has a quirky blog with some pretty cool ideas.
http://calnewport.com/about/#ideas
Well pointed out, Sun!
Lately I have also been thinking about the issues with our human capacity for concentration/paying attention. I do agree from my side that today I am living in the excess of choice and over-demanding tasks at the same time. This two-side sword problem in turn can create the effect of an information overload as well as of unpleasant working environment. I also tend to believe that such Western life of abundance is used to foster the likes of Punk or other expressive cultures.
Moreover, as highlighted in one of our lectures on DBA, it could be useful to interchange 2 tasks in parallel so that when one cannot be continued for sometime, you have the other one to keep yourself busy with. However, having 3 or more tasks in the end is shown to be inefficient. This is an important clue on what strategy better to pursue when trying to multitask, otherwise can lose too much time which you do not really possess these days..