Take a Break From Focus

“You need to avoid certain things in your patterns of thought: everything random and irrelevant, and everything self-important or malicious. Learn to focus your thoughts, so if someone asks what you are thinking about, you can answer truthfully.”– … — “You need to avoid certain things in your patterns of thought: everything random and irrelevant, and everything self-important or malicious. Learn to focus your thoughts, so if someone asks what you are thinking about, you can answer truthfully.”
– Marcus Aurelius

Being distracted can feel like the normal state of existence. We can blame our smart phones or social media, but that doesn't solve the problem. How do you move from being distracted all the time to being more focused?

If you have some work you need to get done, you may do the thing most people do, which is to create a few hours of time to be focused. You decide you won't check your phone for a couple of hours while you finish.

In his 2016 book, Deep Work, Cal Newport argues that this is backwards. By taking short spurts to focus, we're actually taking a break from distractions. In other words, we're training ourselves to be distracted as our default state.

Cal Newport presents an interesting technique for building focus. He argues that we shouldn't take breaks from distraction, we should flip the formula: the default should be focus, and we should take breaks from focus to be distracted.

Instead of setting aside a few hours with no distractions, we can schedule distraction breaks. By reversing the behavior, we train ourselves to be focused most of the time, so when we really need to pay attention to what we're doing, we're not fighting the constant impulse to seek a distraction.

—Erik Pavia, CEO