Distraction reigns all afternoon
Some days focus is elusive, there's simple things can do about it
It was midday and my five-month-old daughter was sleeping. She’d fallen asleep in the car, on the way home from swimming lessons. She was very tired and taking a good, long nap. I made and ate some lunch. After lunch, my wife went to relax in the alfresco area at the back of our home, I went to the home office to work. Peace and quiet, a perfect opportunity for deep work.
The ‘memo’ about this opportunity did not reach my mind. I could reply to (basic) emails, make some phone calls, send an invoice; the kind of work Cal Newport would call shallow work, no problem. Anything requiring concentration: nope. Brain did not want to go anywhere near that.
Every attempt to cajole it into focusing on something deep was met with fierce opposition. Some random thought, some sudden urgency to check out an (un)important fact. Argh!
It’s a pretty common problem. On a given day or time, you can’t concentrate.
As a one-off, it’s likely just your emotions in the moment, and it will pass. However, if sustained there’s surely an underlying cause. To help remove some distractions, I recently turned off notifications on my Apple Watch. It helps, but is not the solution on its own.
I started thinking about why my concentration was lacking. Apart from a natural tendency to get distracted being completely human, is there something else going on?
Do I have ADHD, just without the hyperactivity? (I’m definitely not the hyperactive type). Unlikely, my distractibility seems a somewhat recent phenomenon and I don’t feel the need to psychoanalyse myself and childhood to confirm it!
Have I just got too much going on in my life, that easily concentrating is a struggle? Probably. I am balancing a lot, both professionally and personally.
While contemplating I jumped into the Waking Up app for a meditation and, serendipitously, this came up as the daily reflection ‘moment’:
“How busy do you feel right now? How much is all that you need to do, weighing on you? And how is it weighing on you?
There’s a difference between feeling busy and simply doing the next thing that needs to be done. And you can do that, whatever it is. Even if it requires significant effort, without feeling overwhelmed.
Think of what it’s like to play a game like tennis. Do you feel overwhelmed when the ball comes back across the net. Is that really a problem? No, it’s the whole point of the game.
It’s pretty simple, really. All you can do is what you can do, in each moment. So simply do that, with your full attention.”
Just like feeling overwhelmingly busy, distraction has much to do with mindset. Choosing to return focus to what you’re meant to be doing can make a huge difference.
If you’re getting frustrated continuously refocusing, rather than fighting it, take a few minutes to acknowledge it, reflect, and answer the question: 'What is really going on in my mind right now?’ See what happens.
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