I was chatting to a friend over the Bank Holiday weekend. A previous news junkie, he confessed that he no longer watched the news. “To be honest, Ed,” he said, “We’ve just watched Game of Thrones beginning to end. And I feel much happier. Less stressed. And equally well informed about current affairs.”
I can see his point – football aside, obviously. The news is a depressing place – and it’s time-consuming. The other day I scrolled through Twitter for the first time in months. I barely recognised the world we live in – or I thought we lived in. And that was 15 minutes of my life I’d never get back…
Fifteen minutes doesn’t sound much. But in a business world where we are starting to face competition from AI and machine learning as well as our more traditional rivals, every minute is going to count. Especially as TAB UK members have a life: they’re emphatically not going to spend every waking minute in the office.
So the ability to focus will be more important than it’s ever been.
But it’s hard. We’re surrounded by distractions – the news, the sports news, social media, e-mails, the latest game on your phone where you’re oh-so-tantalisingly close to breaking your record…
That’s why I took more than a cursory glance when Amazon recommended this book to me: Deep Work by Cal Newport.
What is ‘deep work?’ It’s the ability to focus – without distraction – on something that needs real focus.
A favourite blog post of mine is still one from the early years: Make Good Art, inspired by this speech. The argument was simple – whatever you did, that was your art. And the only way to be successful was to do ‘your art’ to the very best of your capabilities. But doing that requires absolute focus – in a world which now seems perfectly designed to remove the ability to focus.
What do I do when I want to produce my ‘art’ – what I hope is my best work?
First of all I block out time in my diary. Ideally, I’m at home, ideally, I’m on my own. My e-mail, text, and WhatsApp alerts are emphatically turned off. And then – in my own version of the Pomodoro technique – I set a timer for each ‘slot.’
…And it works for me.
There is, of course, an even simpler solution.
“It’s absolutely fantastic, Ed,” an unnamed TAB member said, raving to me about his latest ‘tech’ discovery.
“First of all it’s cheap. A thousand quid for a Mac? Forget that.”
“How much?” I asked.
“Three quid,” he said. “It’s called a pad of paper and a pen. The pen is brilliant: it records all your thoughts instantly. No mouse, no keyboard. But it’s the pad of paper that’s the real breakthrough. It doesn’t have e-mail on it. Or the news. Or transfer gossip. It doesn’t even have social media. So the only thing you can do on it is work. What a breakthrough! Smashes AI out of the park. Absolutely astonishing how much you can get done…”
More than a little tongue-in-cheek – but maybe he was making a serious point.
I’ve long maintained that in order to think differently, you need to be somewhere different. I think the same is true of really deep work, where you need to be absolutely focused. Sometimes sitting at your desk doesn’t do it: the familiar patterns of distraction – the almost learned patterns of distraction – re-assert themselves.
Maybe it’s something as simple as moving from your office/spare bedroom to the kitchen table. And I know several TAB members who take themselves off to coffee shops.
That seems counter-intuitive, but, like a lot of people, I’ve done some of my best work in a coffee shop. Why is that? After all, the noise should distract us.
New Scientist suggests that a moderate ambient noise level improves creative task performance.’ Maybe it’s because we’re determined to be seen as working as we sip our flat white. Maybe – as NS says – concentration is contagious. You want to take the coffee shop to its ultimate level? Go and find one in a university library. The sight of all those students bent over their Macs will guarantee you don’t go anywhere near the transfer gossip.
Wherever you go, however, you do it, one thing is certain. The business world is becoming more competitive: the need to focus – to do your very best work – is more important than it has ever been. As owners and directors of SMEs, we need to learn, and we need to go on learning: we need to identify our goals, and we need to work out how to communicate those goals. We can’t do any of those things without a laser focus.
I turn everything off and set my timer. Someone else reaches for a pad of paper. Other TAB members head for the coffee shop.
What do you do? I’d love to hear the answers…
