Now Is the Best Time to Reset Your Focus Skills
Confused. Dazed. Scatterbrained.
It can often feel frustrating to make up your mind to focus, but to feel unable to do so.
To set down a path of focus—to write a song, practice our instrument, work on a design—only to be offered a gleaming off-ramp in the form of a distraction from your phone.
(It even happens to people trying to write a newsletter about focusing. My phone has buzzed 3 times since I started writing this newsletter.)
Each notification from our phones is part of a habit-reward loop that promises a potential dopamine release for our brains.
We know that there is a war going on in the marketplace, and that our attention is the ultimate prize. Tech companies, advertising companies, even nonprofits and other creatives. They all want to win the claim to the next second of our attention.
We also know that companies are spending billions of dollars creating and implementing frameworks that prey on our cognitive blind spots in order to keep us engaged in their products (games, for example).
In addition, we are in the midst of a messy and high-pitched political cycle that makes us feel like we can’t miss a single headline. Every notification could be The Big One.
Not to mention the Black Friday to Cyber Monday onslaught.
It’s exhausting.
But I want to invite you to a different path.
Now is the best time to disengage from our distracted networks of notifications and reengage your focus on what really matters.
This holiday season, make a plan to practice building the skill of focus in your creative life.
A good place to start is with your own ability to set your mind to a difficult task, and actually maintain focus on it for an extended period of time.
But focusing for extended periods of time can be harder than it sounds. You can’t just decide to do it and expect it to be better.
Like any creative skill you have to practice it.
I have noticed several of my university students asking me flat out during office hours: “Can you tell me how to focus on one thing without being distracted?”
I feel for these students—they have grown up in the midst of what Jon Haidt has called The Great Rewiring of Childhood. Haidt is referring to the Gen Z students in my classrooms who have grown up with supercomputers in their hands, with always-on access to video entertainment, social media, video games, and high-speed internet.
But even those who are a bit older like myself (not to mention the generations that came before me) have been affected by this new reality.
So how do we stay on the path? How do we avoid the shiny, enticing off-ramp that beckons us like a Las Vegas casino?
Here are my recommendations, which I offer to you after learning them from others (especially Cal Newport), and from my own experience. They go roughly from solutions that require very little effort, to intensive and persistent actions that take a lot of effort.
If you want me to expand on any of these in a future newsletter, write back and I’ll consider doing a full write up of the option you request.
Turn off notifications on your phone. Only allow notifications for text messages and a select number of other communication apps (for me, these are apps that my kids’ schools and sports teams use to communicate with parents). Turn off notifications for all entertainment and game apps.
Leave your phone in the other room when doing creative work. Yes. Actually in a different room than the one you work in.
Use a dumb alarm clock. Leave your phone in the front room while sleeping.
Adopt the no-phone bathroom policy. No further explanation needed.
Do focus sprints—15 minutes of white-hot focus on a deep work task. Think of these as calisthenics for your mind. If you break focus—by checking email or your phone or otherwise giving in to distraction—you have to start the timer over. It’s okay for you to lose mental focus. When you find your mind wandering, just bring your attention back to the task. The rule is that you can’t act on the distractions. If you need to start at 5 or even 2 minutes, that’s okay. Try to build up to 30 minutes over time. The eventual goal is 90 minutes of undistracted deep work, consistently. It’s the equivalent of going from couch to 5K—for your mind.
Take my Creative Flow on Schedule online course (Skillshare). In it I teach a step-by-step method for building up the habit of consistent creative deep work. (This is a paid course. I have a few free passes I can give out to readers of this newsletter. Just reply if you’re interested.)
Do a full Digital Declutter, à la Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism (here's a video guide to how to do a Digital Declutter).
There are many more, but these are some ways that you can start to reclaim your focus.
If you have to start with one, start with the focus sprints. Set a concrete creative goal, set a timer for 15 minutes, and then just work until the timer runs out without switching to another task.
Attention problems are not new. The description at the beginning of this email—the “confused, dazed, scatterbrained state” of consciousness—was written by American psychologist William James in 1890. He said that this state was the opposite of the state of attention.
According to James, attention is “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought…. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” (James, The Principles of Psychology; qtd. in Haidt, The Anxious Generation, 126–127).
Almost two thousand years before James, Marcus Aurelius exhorted himself to “concentrate every minute like a Roman…on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions.”
In other words, attention is a state of consciousness that has quality. You need to reclaim that quality in your own creative life, if you want next year to be the best creative year of your life.
The best time to start reclaiming your attention was during puberty (again, see Haidt).
The next best time is today.
P.S. The main inspiration for this post was Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation. Chapter 5 should be required reading for all parents. It should also be required by law to be read by a teenager before signing up for a social media account.
Title of Ch. 5: “The Four Foundational Harms [of a Phone-Based Childhood]: Social Deprivation, Sleep Deprivation, Attention Fragmentation, and Addiction”