This edition is all about distraction. Let’s see if you can make it to the end without being tempted away by your phone, to-do list, that other article, etc etc…
More and more, I’m coming to see distraction as one of the defining issues of our time. Of course, life has always been difficult, and we’ve always been prone to major sources of distraction. Just think about how much time people used to spend watching TV, well before social media and smartphones came along. But life doesn’t seem to be getting any easier, and the sources of distraction are getting stronger.
To get to the heart of distraction, I think it helps to define it broadly. According to Nir Eyal - author of the book, Indistractable, and interviewed in the linked podcast - distraction is about relieving discomfort. Your mind is constantly working out where to allocate its scarce resources and attention. When you come up against a task you feel you maybe can’t do, or can’t do well enough, you feel a little bit of discomfort. The doubt and discomfort makes you look elsewhere. You either give in to the discomfort - and get distracted - or stick with it and continue what you’re doing.
A major part of that mental equation is whether there’s something better on offer. Is there an alternative way of spending your time that offers a more guaranteed reward? That’s where sculpting your environment comes in. If it’s just you and a notebook in an empty room in a cosy, warm cottage, with a storm blowing outside, you’re likely to continue writing. But if it’s you in front of a laptop, with the whole world of information and entertainment at your fingertips, in an open office of hotdeskers and coffee on tap - well, I’d be surprised if you made any progress on that novel.
As more goods and services become free and digital - where grabbing our attention is the business model - we find ourselves in environments sculpted for distraction. As Adam Alter notes in his book, Irresistable, people used to spend an average of 15 minutes a day on their smartphone. Now we spend hours. Oh, and it get worse…
It’s not just irresistable technologies that relieve our discomfort. We live in a world where we can pretty much be productive in some shape or form at any given moment. You could reply to your emails, do some admin, get in touch with an old friend, do some exercise, shopping, whatever. In the world of work, people often have countless items on their to-do list that they can “get out of the way” before starting on more important work. This might be better than scrolling on social media. But it’s still a distraction. It’s still taking you away from what really matters.
The problem with this form of distraction is that you can fool yourself into thinking your being productive and good. At least with social media, after an hour of pointless doomscrolling, you know you’ve wasted your time. Not so with replying to all your emails. In fact, the opposite might happen - you might get rewarded by your work colleagues who see you as hard working and efficient. As Cal Newport notes in his book, Deep Work, the completion of trivial tasks - like replying to an email - is relatively easy to measure. But doing meaningful work is often the opposite. It’s only in retrospect, for example, that you know whether writing your novel was worth it. After writing pages 53-56, you have no idea whether you’ve just done important work.
This is why doing what matters feels so uncomfortable. The discomfort you experience from doing meaningful work is the feeling of not knowing. Not knowing whether or not you’re going to fail, whether or not it’s all worth it, whether or not you’re wasting your time. You just don’t get this kind of discomfort and uncertainty from your to-do list items. In short, meaningful work is inherently distractable work.
This is the dillema we’re in. Distraction is not just the result of technologies that are highly distracting. Meaningful work is also highly distractable.
So what do we do?
One option is to change the weights on both sides of the equation. On the meaningful work side, you can create your own internal metrics that give you a sense of reward from even the most intangible, uncertain and uncomfortable activities. If you want to write a novel, make sure to reward yourself for writing every page, even if you have no idea whether you’ll finish the whole thing, or whether anything will ever come of it.
On the distracting alternatives side, you can sculp your environment to remove them as much as possible. Put your phone in another room, turn off the wifi, inform work colleagues and loved ones that you’re unavailable. Interestingly, this is the sort of thing that people who actually work in the tech industry are good at. They know how distracting their products can be, and sculpt their environment accordingly.
But, in addition to these hacks, there’s a more fundamental change we can make - one that Oliver Burkeman explores in his wonderful book, Four Thousands Weeks.
If distraction is ultimately caused by uncertainty and discomfort, Burkeman shows how you can lean into that. Instead of expecting all the things you do to be productive and rewarding, you can expect the opposite: expect discomfort, expect failure, expect wasting your time. If these things are a given, you have the freedom to explore what really matters. You can write that novel without it having to be such a great success. You can write it simply because that’s how you really want to spend your time.
This switch in mindset is one from control to connection - something I write about in almost every edition of this newsletter. It’s fundamental to how we see the world and approach our lives. In control mode, all that matters is quantity: how much reward you’re getting out of a given activity, and how efficiently you’re getting it. In connection mode, it’s quality that matters: how meaningful and important a given activity is in itself, regardless of how useful, productive or rewarding it may be.
To be less distracted, it helps to not think about how much work you’re getting done. Ironically, the more concerned you are with being optimally productive, the more likely you are to get distracted. Instead, ask yourself: Am I doing quality work right now? Getting stuff done may be gratifying in the short-term, but it’s the quality of your activities that makes life meaningful. Everything else is a distraction.
So, did you manage it?! Did you get to the end without being distracted? If so, give yourself a pat on the back. If not, feel free to write a comment below saying what happened :-)
Am reading Four Thousand Weeks at the moment - such a great book!