Chapter 3
Refocus

Reclaim Your Attention: Simple First Steps

“Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on”

– Winifred Gallagher

Now that we've realized we have a major problem, the next step in lifescaling is to learn how to concentrate again by establishing positive and productive daily routines.

Georgetown professor Cal Newport observed, “High-quality work produced is a function of two things—the amount of time you spend on the work and the intensity of your focus during this time.”¹ Increasing your focus will ignite your creativity and help you get more done in less time, while also amplifying the quality of work.

There is no shortage of resources available to help you focus as you launch into your creative ventures. Trust me; I looked everywhere, talked to everyone, and read all that I could. Would-be resource centers are overflowing with platitudes that offer shallow tips, as well as attention-grabbing listicles of generic recommendations masquerading as life-changing prescriptions. My search was exhausting, and I found trying to sort through the glut of advice enormously frustrating. So, here I'll provide a few simple solutions for breaking the bad habits of disruption that I've found hugely helpful.

“High-quality work produced is a function of two things—the amount of time you spend on the work and the intensity of your focus during this time.”

But first, let me address a harmful myth about focus that's gained widespread currency.

Did you know that you have the attention span of a goldfish? Actually, a goldfish holds a one second advantage over you, according to a research report. Apparently, you (and I) can only concentrate for eight whole consecutive seconds, whereas a goldfish can focus for a whopping nine seconds.² And what's especially frightening is how rapidly our attention span has been eroding. When it was measured in 2008, it was twelve seconds. So, we've lost four seconds in five years! What will we be down to in another five?

Do not believe this.

When I dug into the basis of this claim, I discovered that the so-called study that generated this meme is a prime example of what I call short attention span theater.

Details about the research process were scarce at best. Here's what we do know. The report was sponsored by the advertising office of Microsoft Canada. The authors are not named, and the source of the eight second figure is a website called Statistic Brain, which offers zero sources of its own about the information it provides. Dig deeper, and not only does something smell fishy; the whole thing is bait. I couldn't actually find any real research that pinpoints the exact attention span of goldfish.

Think about it. When you binge-watch your favorite show, are you only able to watch it in eight-second bursts? How absurd! Similarly, I'll bet a goldfish could focus on eating for longer than nine seconds if it had to.

We haven't lost our ability to focus at all. We just need to reclaim it. We can unlearn disruptive behaviors, learn new skills, and build new routines that help us chart the new course of lifescaling.

Let me propose an alternative outlook. We haven't lost our ability to focus at all. We just need to reclaim it. We can unlearn disruptive behaviors, learn new skills, and build new routines that help us chart the new course of lifescaling.

Practicing a set of simple techniques will free up our energy and intention to help us take the next steps on the journey. We're not trying to make one big dive into sustained concentration, like going cold turkey. We'll get to building up our deep focus later. For now, it's best to take incremental and relatively painless steps. I call this attention hacking.³

Remember the story of the car that breaks down? Attention hacks are like quick fixes to get your car going. Like aid from a helpful fellow motorist who sees you in distress and pulls up and says, “Hey, I can fix that.” You pop the hood and this kind person adjusts a few things that help your car idle at a higher RPM. Now, you can make it to your event! Is your car really fixed? No. But, you will get to the event. And, following the event, you can take your car into the shop to fix the core problem that was causing the breakdowns in the first place.

Attention hacks provide immediate relief that frees up our minds to begin the more substantial work of actually curing our distraction. They're small fixes to get you moving forward.

These are all hacks I've experimented with while researching and writing this book. They don't demand radical behavioral shifts and can produce incredible results. There is no single hack sufficient to reclaim your powers of focus, but in combination these techniques can get you solidly on a path to repair. Before long, you'll be moving forward at an accelerated pace, and I'll bet you'll even start coming up with some of your own hacks. You will relish the relief hacks bring.

Attention hacks provide immediate relief that frees up our minds to begin the more substantial work of actually curing our distraction.

Procrastinate Procrastination

For the first year of trying to write my proposal for what I hoped would be my next book (but that thankfully led to this book), I built up so much anxiety before each scheduled work session that I would do anything else besides write. Clean the house. Organize the garage. Hell, I'd even take out the garbage.

Procrastination is a subconscious attempt to avoid unpleasant emotions stirred up by the task we're meant to be doing. Whether it's fear, worry, anxiety, shame, anger, panic, or even FOMO, avoidance behaviors give us a momentary reprieve. The irony is, though, that procrastination ultimately intensifies the very negative emotions we're trying to evade, because it leads to actual urgency to complete a task.

Procrastination is a subconscious attempt to avoid unpleasant emotions stirred up by the task we're meant to be doing.

After deep self-reflection as a result of embracing the idea and need for this book, I realized that the negative emotions I was trying to circumvent were shame and self-doubt. Somewhere along the way, I lost the joy of creation. I was creating perfunctorily and tackling creative projects transactionally. I was cranking out work as fast as I could and moving right on to the next project. In the process, I wasn't dancing with imagination. I wasn't inspired. Creation had become a chore. Happiness wasn't even a memory. I had forgotten about the relationship between achievement and ecstasy. I didn't celebrate my moments, and this led to drudgery.

At the end of every day, rather than feeling great about the work I'd accomplished, as I used to, I felt no sense of fulfillment or pride in the work. Over time, as I kept trudging through projects, I actually felt progressively worse about myself, increasingly doubting my creativity and performance. I was caught in a vicious cycle of self-defeat. I even began questioning whether I wanted to maintain the level of success I'd achieved. I was unwittingly practicing self-sabotage. What's more, I didn't actually realize the extent to which I was underperforming.

Thankfully my research into procrastination showed the way out. We can choose to succumb to the waves of difficult emotions that lead us to procrastinate, or we can plant our feet, brace ourselves, and let each wave pass.

Solving the problem is not about simple time management. You can do a good job of that with a to-do list and a calendar. The key is to change how you perceive the pain of the task you're pushing aside and envision the pleasure of completing it.

Instead of focusing on the negative attributes of a pending project, visualize the tangible benefits and the feelings that will result from the timely and exceptional delivery of your project. Take a little time to do that right now with something you've been putting off. What message of appreciation might you receive for doing it? What joy will you feel in the accomplishment? Also visualize the outcome you don't want to happen. Now, discipline yourself to sit with the difficult feelings that arise in response to this exercise for a few minutes, and then return to envisioning achievement.

Legendary boxer and showman Muhammad Ali dreaded training. He once famously said,⁴ “I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'”

If you can't visualize it, you can't achieve it. If you can't appreciate it, you can't learn and build upon those learnings to celebrate accomplishments and progress. We are our own thieves of happiness. We rob ourselves of the little moments that are actually transports of contentment now and in the long-term.

Good Morning, Brain.

Even making a dent in your next creative project is enough to flush negativity out of your mind, body, and soul. A great way to get going is to prioritize what's important at the beginning of your day.

For years, I started my morning with emails and coffee and then stacked meetings and calls following, so that I could focus on important projects for the rest of the day. By the time I was ready to think critically and wanted to draw on my creativity for deeper projects, I was already low on initiative, imagination, and drive. I couldn't dive beyond the shallows without incredible effort. By the end of the evening, when I would return to my desk after dinner and tucking in my girls for the night, I would sit in front of my screen, desperately trying to activate my mind. I found myself constantly chasing the very distractions I was intent on avoiding! I told myself that doing so might just be the spark of creativity I needed. Maybe a great article would ignite my passion, or a marvelous video would pump me up.

I was expending precious creative fuel I desperately needed, and I accomplished very little while sacrificing valuable time I should have been using to relax and restore. I would have to abandon lots of mediocre output and write-off the wasted time and energy so as to not affect my overall work quality and professional reputation.

Had I only been aware of how much more productive my brain could be right after a good night of some quality downtime and good sleep, who knows what I could have accomplished.

Our body replenishes our creative juices to begin each day with our full potential.

Prioritizing your day with the most important projects at the beginning gives you a fresh start with a reset brain that has released its mental exhaust. Research shows that our brains are much sharper in the morning. In fact, I learned that our brains are actually bigger,⁵ literally, in the morning. The Montreal Neurological Institute analyzed almost 10,000 MRI scans and found that the brain shrinks over the course of the day only to return to its full size the next morning.⁶ The team compared the brain to a sponge, which begins fully hydrated in the morning due to the redistribution of fluids during sleep. Our body replenishes our creative juices to begin each day with our full potential.

Now maybe you're one of those people who are night owls, who thrive on the solitude of late evenings and find that's your most creative, productive part of the day. Research in the field of chronobiology has validated that some people have different circadian rhythms, and that it's best not to fight our natural rhythms.⁷ But you still need to make sure you're getting a good amount of sleep. With that condition, adjusting your schedule to your biology is just fine; the key point is that you need to plug into your brain when it is at its prime. And for most of us, that's in the morning.

So, I suggest for most of you that you schedule first thing in the morning⁵ for deeper projects and allocate blocks later in the day to less demanding work like checking emails and answering the ones that just need a quick reply, doing your filing, and having one-on-one meetings with your staff. The evening before, decide what your next day looks like and stick to the plan. Do not cancel or reschedule these appointments with creativity. This is your time. This is “the present you” making time for a “future you.” And the importance of this part cannot be overstated—go through that list of accomplishments each day, and smile. Cross things off your list and savor your productivity.

Single-task as a matter of ritual

This is easier said than done. I get it. But hopefully, the litany of harmful effects from multitasking in the previous chapter will convince you to try. Once you are working on your scheduled important morning task, work on it with rigorously minimized distractions.

Turn off notifications in important moments.

Did you know that we have two separate attention networks? There's a conscious system that allows us to focus on tasks at hand. Then there is an unconscious network, and it is very vulnerable to distraction.⁸ It shifts focus toward whatever external or internal signals our senses pick up in a moment.⁹ Even though your conscious mind may be 100% focused on whatever's important, your unconscious attention network never shuts down. This is a key reason that all of our tech distractions are so hard to ignore.

Keep this in mind as you begin work each morning: It's estimated that mobile phone users receive upwards of 200 notifications per day.¹⁰ That's not including the daily real-world distractions they receive within the same period. The struggle with notifications is that they cause information overload in compounding microdoses.

Notifications are a self-defeating temptation meant to fool you into believing that you only matter when people are reacting to or reaching out to you. They are designed to create an intoxicating feedback loop of rewards from internal stimulants that make us feel good because we're being noticed, and people want our attention.

They are horribly damaging to your productivity. Research shows that when you switch away from your primary task to check email, respond to a text, check your social media status, or whatever, you add to the total time it takes to complete your main project by an average of 25%.¹¹

So, turn off all notifications on your system. Do it. Go on Do Not Disturb or Airplane mode on your smartphone. Also, clean up your desktop and close unnecessary windows, browser tabs, and apps.

Take a different kind of break

Essential to revitalizing focus as you move through the day is taking strategically timed breaks. Whether you work for 25 minutes and take a five-minute break, or you push through one-hour intervals and take a 15-minute break, try using breaks to do something you wouldn't normally do. Instead of opening email, checking notifications, or surfing the web, do something personally rewarding.

For instance, stand up, close your eyes, and stretch. Bend over and try to touch your toes and hold the position for 20 seconds. Try to do as many pushups as you can. (I recently joined the 100-pushups-a-day club!) Go for a quick walk. Deliver a hug to someone close by. Call someone special and tell them you love them. Convey a compliment to someone who deserves it. Recall a joyful event and smile. Whatever it is, do something that makes you feel good before you get back to your masterpiece.

Work in sprints

If I can be transparent with you, at the beginning, I couldn't get past six minutes without catching myself impulsively jumping to other tabs, reaching for a device or getting up for some reason, like to grab yet another coffee, do some cleaning, or organize my closet. I'd realize that I was mindlessly shuffling through the stuff on my desk, or lost in daydreaming.

A great help to me was working in shorter sprints than I had done in the past. They are a great way to begin to learn how to become distraction-free. Even this short sprint approach is not without its challenges, however. It may sound easy, but as you'll experience, focusing for 25 distraction-free minutes or more demonstrates exactly why we're going through this exercise. I found one method for sticking with my sprints especially helpful.

A great help to me was working in shorter sprints than I had done in the past. They are a great way to begin to learn how to become distraction-free.

It's called the Pomodoro Technique. Inspired by the Pomodoro kitchen timer, this time management method was developed by Francesco Cirillo¹² in the late 1980s. It uses the timer, or in my case a mobile phone and desktop app, to break down workflows into approachable 25-minute sprints, separated by five-minute breaks.

Here's how the process works:

Choose a task to be accomplished.
Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes.
Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper (or the app) related to the project.
Take a five-minute break.
After every four Pomodoros, take a longer break (usually between 15–30 minutes).

While 25 minutes might not seem like a long time, or perhaps it does (it did for me!), think of it as a block of output. And as with building blocks, they stack up fast, and each one will contribute vitally to completion.

Over time you can carve out longer time periods for sprints. I'm now working toward flows of focusing for 40 minutes and then taking 20-minute breaks. Some productivity experts have recommended 52-minute sprints and 17-minute breaks, which will be my next step.

The 52-minute increment comes from a study¹³ published by DeskTime, a company that develops a popular time-tracking app, in which the researchers found that the app's most productive 10 percent of users take breaks after working intently for close to one hour. Here's how they described their findings:

The reason the most productive 10% of our users are able to get the most done during the comparatively short periods of working time is that their working times are treated as sprints. They make the most of those 52 minutes by working with intense purpose, but then rest up to be ready for the next burst. During the 52 minutes of work, you're dedicated to accomplishing tasks, getting things done, and making progress. Whereas, during the 17 minutes of break, you're completely removed from the work you're doing—you're entirely resting, not peeking at your email every five minutes or just “quickly checking Facebook.”

The longest increment recommended for sprints is 90 minutes, which is inspired by the research of Nathaniel Kleitman. He identified what he calls the “basic rest–activity cycle.”¹⁴ In his work, Kleitman found that our brains work in 90-minute rest–activity cycles as we traverse the five stages of sleep—from alertness to deep sleep. His studies also observed that our bodies follow a similar 90-minute rhythm when we're awake. When it comes to productivity, he proposed that we are at our peak at the top of a 90-minute cycle and that our productivity declines from there until we reset the clock.

As we go through the rest of the book together, try to keep expanding your work blocks from 25 minutes to 40 or 52 minutes, and if you want to try it, go on ahead to 90 minutes. I know you will be thrilled with how you're building discipline and forming a whole new habit.

To begin, right now:

Schedule time for one project tomorrow morning.
Block out 25 minutes on your calendar.
Tomorrow morning, hang the Do Not Disturb sign physically and digitally.
Turn off notifications.
Turn off your phone.
Turn off email.
Close all those tabs—you know what I'm talking about.
Resist temptation to indulge in any diversion, regardless of how quick or seemingly harmless.
Put on your headphones.
Have refreshments at the ready.
Use the restroom.
Start the clock, and

Focus.

Notes

¹https://medium.com/taking-note/why-deep-work-matters-in-a-distracted-world-ee4a675375f0

²https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinebeaton/2016/12/19/the-underlying-reason-you-cant-focus/

³https://www.eruptingmind.com/avoidance-behaviors-and-procrastination/

⁴https://www.muscleandperformance.com/training-performance/how-ali-became-the-greatest

⁵https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26049148

⁶http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2015/06/08/brain-bigger-in-the-morning/#.W00Rny2ZOXE

⁷https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/2/27/17058530/sleep-night-owl-late-riser-chronotype-science-delayed-sleep-phase

⁸https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26049148

⁹http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1073858413494269

¹⁰https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/aug/20/does-music-really-help-you-concentrate

¹¹https://www.neverproductive.com/notifications/

¹²http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/business/25multi.html

¹³https://francescocirillo.com/pages/pomodoro-technique

¹⁴https://lifehacker.com/52-xminute-work-17-minute-break-is-the-ideal-productivi-1616541102

¹⁵https://hbr.org/2010/05/for-real-productivity-less-is