Attention and the compulsive digital habit
Digital habits and interruptions can consume both writing time and the attention needed to think. Writers use different combinations of protected work periods, controlled access to messages and deliberate breaks, while experiences differ on how much interruption is helpful.
Distraction beyond the minutes it consumes
In a 2012 personal account, a writer described becoming absorbed in Words with Friends after her daughter introduced her to it six months earlier: the phone stayed beside her throughout waking hours, and nine simultaneous games consumed half an hour in the morning and sometimes more at night. She found that wanting to win distracted her from the rumination essential to her writing, and switching off the phone cleared her head.
Continuous partial attention describes skimming incoming information without forming a coherent thought; one writer used software to switch off Wi-Fi for several hours to regain concentration. Other writers used internet-disabled computers, while one essayist and novelist described never using a mobile phone, tweeting or entering Facebook.
Interruptions and breaks
Uninterrupted concentration is not equally comfortable for everyone: one medical editor found sitting still and concentrating for three hours during a 2006 certification examination unexpectedly difficult. She contrasted this with an office day of unplanned requests, calls, conversation and online distractions, and concluded that interruptions could energise her through rapid changes of task, quick thinking, laughter or learning. Having previously regarded distractions as obstacles, she found that she focused better when distraction was an option.
An alternative approach recommends removing avoidable distractions: a private office helps, while earphones, a lamp directed at the page and turning away from an office or cubicle entrance can reduce distractions in shared space. The analogy is an operating room, where bright light on the surgical field and draping around it may help direct attention to the task. When focus slips, a break to walk around or fetch a drink can clear the mind before returning to work. Dedication is also within a writer’s control despite dissatisfaction with colleagues, management, salary or surroundings: each job should be treated as important and done to the best of the writer’s ability.
Email, phones and difficult tasks
In one freelance-efficiency approach, email and the phone are identified as the biggest time wasters, alongside social media and television; a difficult task can make displacement activities such as tea-making or ironing attractive. Leaving email open makes checking it particularly tempting when work becomes challenging. Suggested countermeasures are checking email two or three times daily, for example first thing and at lunchtime, and switching off new-message alerts. This may be impractical during a critical project stage requiring regular client contact, so it is an approach to try and adapt; the writer recommending it found her day more productive.
Sending unarranged calls to voicemail can protect concentration on the current document and allow full attention to the caller when returning the call. For a task that is hard to start, a timer set for about 20 minutes can make work feel manageable, with the approaching break helping concentration. These practices are suggested ways to reduce unnecessary visits to email and social media.
Other freelancers use different checking schedules: one described keeping email off most of the day but opening it roughly hourly for clients and high-priority messages, answering other messages twice daily, and limiting social media to once or twice daily, generally after priority work in late afternoon. Another closed email and occasionally disconnected office and mobile phones during essential tasks, and avoided all nonwork web searches on the work computer. A third kept email software in the background, muted the phone, received voicemail notifications by email and checked social media in the evenings.
Deep work and the discomfort of concentration
Cal Newport’s concept of deep work concerns focused effort on cognitively challenging tasks, described as valuable, rare and meaningful. His approach protects blocks without distraction rather than leaving demanding work to gaps between email and meetings; freelancers and remote workers can control some aspects of when, where and how they work. It includes scheduling distraction periods as well as focused periods, developing a deep-work ritual and using a daily shutdown.
Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks takes limited time as a reason to choose what to do, and argues that increased productivity creates more work rather than eventual peace and calm. In this account, distraction can be an escape from emotional discomfort about important work; suggested responses include blocks of work, patience and accepting uncomfortable feelings when the work matters.
Flow, in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s account, is being fully present and focused on a specific, achievable task, as can occur in singing, dance and sport as well as work and other daily activities. A medical-writing workshop account similarly described flow as immersion in which the passage of time disappears.
Practices for deep and shallow work
One approach distinguishes shallow tasks requiring little cognitive effort but taking time from deep work requiring concentration, cognitive power and endurance. Shallow work can be visible and valuable yet readily replicated by someone else, while deep work draws on skills and knowledge built over months and years; some shallow tasks could be learned by another person in a few weeks. The approach treats attention as something to cultivate and work as expression, rejecting a simple division between enjoyable play and unenjoyable work.
It proposes 90 uninterrupted minutes as a deep-work sweet spot requiring practice, and describes a typical desire for 8–10 hours of uninterrupted deep work weekly. Protecting that time may require self-advocacy because managers and teams can undervalue stretches during which little appears to be accomplished.
Its recommendations for cultivating deep work are as follows.
- Prioritise tasks with Eisenhower’s urgent–important matrix.
- Plan time blocks with space for deep work.
- Tell others when entering a block so they do not expect an instant response.
- Protect the block by declining meetings during it.
- Switch off notifications, using device “do not disturb” settings where appropriate.
- Create a routine that signals the start of deep work.
- Rest between sessions.
- Compare actual use of time with the plan.
Its recommendations for minimising shallow work are as follows.
- Automate or delegate low-importance tasks.
- Set reminders so details need not be held in mind.
- Compress message answering into a defined period, such as 30 minutes.
- Make unavailability normal rather than expecting immediate replies.
The workshop account emphasised that reaching deep focus involves tolerating tedium after becoming accustomed to easy, immediate rewards, and that this effort makes rest afterwards important.