Subtitle: how to temporarily put your head down to focus, on different timescales
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There's a very famous productivity technique called the "pomodoro", named after the Italian word for "tomato" because its inventor used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. There's a lot of subtlety to the full technique, but here I'm going to mostly refer to the basic elements:
pick something to work on
work on it for 25 minutes without distraction
when the 25 minutes ends, take a break for 5 minutes
(even if you don't feel like taking a break, take one anyway! stopping randomly, rather than when stuck, can make it easier to get back into it after your break, and it can be easier to get focused if you trust that you'll pause when the timer goes off)
...repeat 2 & 3 until the task is complete or no longer top priority
There's something profoundly relieving, for many people, when they first try the pomodoro technique, where a big question goes away:
should I interrupt what I'm doing to talk to my coworker?
should I be working on something else?
should I be taking a break?
should I be working? (if taking a break)
The internal conflict that comes from evaluating these questions every minute or two while trying to work or rest burns a lot of energy without really producing anything meaningful. It's not to say that those aren't important questions to consider, just that by default most people can't usefully consider them every minute.
So instead: pomodoros: a license not to think of anything that isn't relevant to the task at hand, for 25 minutes.
But then, why stop at 25 minutes?
Say you have 4 tasks, that are all part of the same project.
You could set aside 2 hours, and for those 2h, focus on nothing but that project. So during the 5-minute pomodoro breaks, you still wouldn't check whatsapp or twitter. You might take a short walk, or get a snack, or meditate, or some other
centering distraction. Honestly, this is advised even if you're doing 4 unrelated things in a row.
But you also might spend the breaks doing some planning in relation to the project.
The point is that you're narrowing the scope of your attention so it's clear what's in-scope and what's out-of-scope, and you can relax knowing that there's nothing else you should be doing and that the timer will eventually remind you about the rest of the world for those 2 hours?
But then, why stop at 2 hours?
Depending on the nature of your work (self-employed vs employed, office vs at-home) you might find yourself thinking "you know, I'd actually like to be fully and completely focused on work for the whole workday"
To be clear, I'm not proposing that you might do this to make your boss happy. Such an approach would likely make you resentful almost immediately, which can be destructive (not to mention distracting) in the relatively short-term, not just the long-term.
If you get what I'm talking about here, you'll see that there's a kind of liberation. You become free to do nothing but the work you're focused on. And ultimately: most people find that doing good day's work is not just more satisfying at the end of the day, but more satisfying while you're doing it too. At least, more satisfying than intending to work but bouncing around between other things.
Now, of course, a completely focused workday doesn't mean staring at your screen for 8h straight. You'd still want to break for lunch, take a walk, talk to
coworkers, stare into space while ideas cohere, etc. Maybe even take a nap!
The point is that you can still curate your attention for an entire day so that you're not shifting focus to look at news every few minutes.
You can also do this in reverse, eg by choosing not to check certain sites or whatever after a particular time in the day. In February 2020, I had to stop reading COVID news after 10pm because it would make me panicky before bed but I wasn't actually going to take any actions before bed.
But then, why stop at 1 day?
Okay, here it gets a bit weirder. I've gotten a ton of value out of having very intense focus on specific projects for entire weekends or entire weeks, with no facebooking or news-reading or whatever in the midst of that.
To be clear, as I write this during the coronavirus pandemic, unless you're already stocked up with months of food and very isolated from the rest of society, you probably want to be tuning into the local situation every day or two, if not the global situation. After all, your "go for a midafternoon walk to think about your work" move might suddenly become illegal in your city/country. And you'd want to know that.
(These are weird times.)
But depending on what your work is and the extent to which it connects with global events, it may still make sense to say "you know, my main plan for this week is to keep writing my book" and to not continually re-assess that with updating news.
In addition to the time boundary, you could also say "unless <EVENT> happens" for some specific event
The point I'm trying to make here is that there's a relationship between time & purpose, and that it can be valuable to consciously dedicate a period of time to a particular purpose, and then to allow everything outside that purpose to fall out of your awareness for the duration of that period of time.
Lots of external situations have this structure naturally: if you go on a camping or meditation retreat, likely you put away your phone for its duration. If you go to a 1-day conference, you probably aren't thinking about your dishes at home or your incoming email. And when you're on a phone call, you're mostly just tuning into whatever you're talking about with the other person; perhaps also the scenery if you go for a walk. It's just easier in those contexts to do that.
So the question is how to create this kind of structure yourself, when you need it?
One option is to construct the external situation: design some sort of retreat, or schedule a call with a friend where the two of you are going to each keep each other on task towards your respective taxes.
This idea can be extended into having a few different user accounts on your laptop, one for work, one for a side project, and one for whatever. Or if you're working from home, using a particular desk for work and consciously moving physically before switching to play mode.
If you can find a way to set this up, it can be a very powerful technique. However, ultimately the thing that really needs to shift is your internal sense of "what am I doing right now?" Otherwise you might find yourself fighting those constraints.
The other challenge is that there are different scales of scope on which you're trying to manage your attention. You may be working from home but distracted from doing your actual work by a barrage of incoming slack messages. Or you might need to be on twitter for work, but then you encounter a news item and your attention spirals away into that.
To shift things, you need fractal pomodoros. As I write this, I'm in a 2-layer structure
Now I'm asking myself "what does this draft need to be workable for now?"
Key takeaways (these haven't necessarily been clearly articulated above)
freedom & constraints go together: you can relate to the whole thing as a restriction "I can't look at X during this pomodoro / deep focus day" or you can relate to it as a license: "I am free from having to consider X during this pomodoro / deep focus day"
I am free to focus solely on my work. Nobody/nothing else can bother me.
One unusual lens is that people will naturally find something to focus on, and if they don't give themselves permission/authorization to focus on their work, it'll be fb or something
limit incoming information to information you're going to act on
this can be harder to do as the pace of global events increases
this looks like "don't check news/messages mid-X unless there's a decent chance that that news/message would contain info Y that would make Z be genuinely higher priority than X, such that if you'd known Y before starting X, you wouldn't have started X in the first place."
Other work projects can also distract
This is also about having periods during which you're free from needing to question if what you're working on is the best thing to be working on. This is part of the original pomodoro technique. It's not just "work for 25 minutes", it's "work on this particular thing and not any other thing no matter how worthwhile it seems, for 25 minutes."
Between each pomodoro, you can consider things like "am I about to spend a third hour on something I thought was worth doing because I thought it would only take 10 minutes? maybe it isn't worth doing!" but don't think about that question mid-pomodoro, just roll with it
even doing other things-worth-doing can still fragment your attention, unless you consciously shift your attention up a level of abstraction so it can hold all of what you're doing
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