On surviving in the age of distraction
I’m sitting at my desk and looking out the window, fascinated by the way the pouring rain leaves droplets on the leaves of the tree outside, like crystals on a green velvet dress. And then just as rapidly as it started, the rain comes to a complete halt—matching the state of my progress on writing today. The act of writing is often slow and tedious as I look for the words and clarity that can capture the essence of the thought on paper. In these moments of frustration, I catch myself getting restless instead of reflecting. It feels unnatural to just sit here and let these time intervals wash over. I’m not being maximally and tangibly productive when I have the capacity to get so many other things done during these seemingly inert hours.
I self-interrupt to check if there are any texts that need returning even though I’ve always been a lousy texter, unwilling to give in to the expectation of around-the-clock availability and immediate responsiveness. I guiltily check Instagram to drown my anxiety even though I’m all too aware of the risks of being swept into social media sinkholes. I open a new tab to read The New Yorker, the urge to consume information overriding almost any relevance of the subject of the information itself. I check my email frequently, much like a ravenous person pointlessly and repeatedly opens the fridge hoping for a magically teleported snack. I make a note to pick up a prescription from Walgreens, remember that I still haven’t returned Zara, and suddenly feel crushed by the mounting pile of laundry that needs to be done. Mea culpa. I live with a constant sense that there must be something else that deserves my attention right at this moment.
A sustained state of flow remains out of grasp as I pay the high price of switching context. In returning to the task at hand after perusing other corners of the web for a mere ten minutes, it’s hard to reorient myself. I have a vague feeling that I was on the cusp of framing a compelling thought. But it is now lost in that distracting haze, gone forever.
All these past years, the cross-functional role I inhabited at work had encouraged and rewarded “stakeholder management”, corporate speak that in the day-to-day meant responding pell-mell to a press of immediate demands from disparate corners as I juggled multiple projects, people, and expectations. I took pride in my ability to rapidly switch between overflowing tasks—read a marketing brief, solve a salesperson’s dilemma about a product feature, dial into a meeting to get buy-in. That #tablife defined my existence, the many open browser windows condemning me further into the paradigm of split attention. A hyper-productive person in the knowledge-based industry isn’t always a focused person.
Illustration: #tablife
In the days immediately after I catapulted from the life of a product marketer to that of the voluntarily unemployed wanderer in search of a creative boost, it felt strangely odd to be working on a single task at a time. I felt antsy, unsettled. I had intentionally escaped the pre-ordained existence of my largely engineered work setup where my attention wasn’t my own to direct at will. I had yearned to create free-flowing space for deep work. Yet I also dearly missed the constant stimulation. My old habits followed me into my new life. It became abundantly clear that mending my fractured mental landscape, reduced attention span, and an innate sense of distraction had to be the first order of business if I were to get anything meaningful done in this year off from work.
It turns out that I wasn’t asking myself the right question. All this while, I kept trying to fill every minute of the day productively by asking how I should be optimizing my time. Instead, I needed to reflect on what is worth paying attention to. A world of a difference between the two once we shift the lens.
The attention crises of today’s age are now widely remarked upon. Technology, its main culprit, has proven to be very good at wasting the time it helps us save. You Instacarted and didn’t have to make that trip to a grocery store? Great, you have more time to scroll through that Instagram feed instead. We are all susceptible, whether we live in the epicenter of the technology business or in a small town in India like my Whatsapp-addicted parents. In response to the crises, several books such as Digital Minimalism have emerged with not so practical advice focused on an imagined individual in an ideal world.
The fact remains that like most other inventions in history, communication technology is a double-edged sword. It can be wonderful and magical. Or it can be an apocalyptic force hurtling us into the dystopian world of Wall-E, where fastening ourselves to screens for mindless digital consumption is our only purpose, our only way of relating to the world.
Whether we consume the internet or let it consume us starts with an articulation of what is happening to us in this social experiment that we have all been enrolled in. There will be a steep UN-learning curve for any of us who attempt to rewire our brain and rebuild our focus. In this current battle of wills between us and an entire ecosystem of apps through which we conduct our lives, we will lose again and again. The human will is only finite. But I’ve found the key is to remove any self-judgment and just start again. The reward at the end of the preparatory struggle is a more present and examined life.
In this endeavor, I have made three simple lifestyle choices. Maybe these are obvious to you but I took time to arrive at the true wisdom and utility of these practices in shaping our increasingly shapeless mental lives.
Becoming aware of and comfortable with moments of boredom
With the entirety of human knowledge at our fingertips, it is impossible to be bored. Yet, ironically, the rate at which we get bored these days has only accelerated. Just the other day, I witnessed my boyfriend checking his Twitter feed consuming whatever comes out of the ether while watching a Netflix show that he very much enjoys. Such is his need for stimuli that having one source wasn’t good enough for him, he needed another one...at the exact same time.
Notice the next time you find yourself reaching for your phone because you can’t afford to stand idly in line for ten minutes. Or when you use your smartphone as a pacifier to deal with moments of anxiety and negative emotions, however trifling. Or when you check your Apple watch notifications thus dropping 30 IQ points from the conversation you were in the middle of. Ask yourself: what is worth paying attention to? What you dissipate your energy on in a day is a zero-sum game.
Last week, I was standing in a slow-moving line outside of a wonderful local running store. There were four other people ahead of me who had taken the same new year resolution to improve their running practice. My first instinct was to reach out for the phone in my pocket and be “productive” while continuing to lament the long wait time. Or, I reminded myself that I could use this time to take shelter from regular distractions; train my mind to not scratch that never-ending itch to consume more information. So I stood there and let the boredom fester. I turned my attention to the pristine roads of Laurel Heights (increasingly a rarity in San Francisco). I watched the birds flying in and out of the tree nearby. I observed a 20-something woman wave out from her window to a friend who happened to be passing by her house. She perched herself on her window sill and he leaned against a pole on the sidewalk as they chit-chatted before he moved on to wherever he was going. I carried the calmness of being more attuned to the world around me through the rest of my otherwise busy day.
Illustration: The notification bell
Taking advantage of the pandemic to build a regular schedule
The business of being an adult means we are free to do what we want at our own schedule outside of work (maybe not so much if you are a parent). We live in a market of free choices yet the only choice for most of us is to keep consuming synthetic digital experiences, gliding from one screen to another as we go about our day—laptop to phone to Peloton to TV.
Schedules and rituals, on the other hand, relieve us of the burden of choice about what to do next. Ironically, they provide freedom in the guise of submission. I have been taking advantage of the uniformity of our days in the pandemic to bring structure into my life. I have carved out an almost predictable routine to walk the dog, write, workout, eat meals, watch television, and even check social media. This familiarity prevents me from feeling impoverished for time or filling pauses in my day with compulsive smartphone usage that leaves us feeling exhausted, self-forgetting and anxious.
Spending an hour a day single-tasking
If you have ever seen a carpenter or a painter at a work, you may recognize that many of the hard-skilled workers do not face the same predicaments of distraction as the rest of us do. They get to immerse themselves in a single task without having to worry about all the things that may be falling through the cracks while they focus on their craft.
While not all of us can pick up a hard skill, we can start to exercise our minds the same way. Single-tasking, defined as doing one activity at a time with as few distractions and interruptions as possible, is great for building focus. This may be the most important and perhaps in time one of the simplest things we do to train our minds to be less distracted. After all, the key is to do less, not more.
Bring single-tasking to your everyday activities, big or small. Order a craft kit and spend an hour doing something creative, if you are so inclined. Set a DND (do not disturb for the uninitiated) block on your work calendar and write that doc you have meaning to write, uninterrupted. You may find yourself staring at the screen in between, but don't give in to the temptation to check Slack or news.
“Distractibility might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity”, as Matthew Crawford explains in his book The World Beyond Your Head. Just as we don’t devour all the fatty and sweet food easily accessible to us because we care about our bodies, we need to not give in to the hyper-palatable stimuli claiming our attention for the health of our minds.
Fast forward six weeks, I’m still adjusting to fully owning my attention. But at the very least I have begun the transition from having a front row seat to my life to actually feeling more in control, from living weekend-to-weekend to actually being present in life’s moments, from feeling a spiraling dissatisfaction with how I spend my time to ending my days with gratification. It’s a work in progress, but progress nonetheless.