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Don’t take focus too far
So many of us feel beset by distractions, but it’s telling that the whole idea of a distraction really requires you to assume that you know in advance which things that might fill the next hour, the next day, which things are good things, and which things are unwanted things that should be eliminated. Now this is true so far as it goes. Right? If I’m setting out to write a chapter of a book, I can be fairly sure that kind of working myself into a rage over political news on a social media platform is not as wanted and not as useful as making progress on the book. But you can take this much too far. And, actually, a lot of approaches to productivity, I think, encourage us to try to exert total control over how the next period of time is going to unfold. They define more things as distractions and interruptions and make the experience of being distracted or interrupted worse.
So an example I like to give is, you know, if I’m working from my office at home and it’s one of the afternoons when I’m not on after school duties with our son and he bursts into the room to tell me excitedly about something that’s happened at school that day. Now look. There are certain times when I’m doing something where I have to say, “Look, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to chat with you about this later.” Sure. Absolutely. I’m not saying one must always stop the moment that someone wants your attention. But if I’m using a system for scheduling my day that, like, defines that period of time as, like, a focus stretch and then makes it into a problem when it wouldn’t otherwise have been a problem that my son sought out a moment of connection, like, that’s a terrible way to live. That’s basically taking things that life ought to be about, like moments of connection with one’s family, and making them wrong just because they clash with this, like, plan I have. I think it’s really important not to go too far in the direction of trying to eliminate everything that could possibly count as an interruption and then find that you’ve kind of eliminated half of the best bits of life.
Follow a middle path
The 3-4 hour rule is this idea that reflects a pattern that you can see in the routines and rituals of so many authors and artists, scientists, mathematicians, composers, all the way through history where they, to an astonishingly uniform degree, dedicate about 3-4 hours a day, no more, to the core work, the core work of their lives that requires sort of deep thought and quiet and focus and reflection. And I think for all knowledge workers, there’s something to learn and to borrow from here. It’s not just these anecdotes. There’s also lots of evidence to suggest that, you know, you actually are going to make more progress on focused work if you constrain it in this way. It’s tiring to focus in this fashion, you need time to replenish. Also, there’s an aspect or many aspects of the creative process that are actually going to be doing their work once you’ve stopped doing that, once you’re in the rest of your day and you’re relaxing that sort of focused mental energy.
And the other thing I really like about this rule is that it represents a good sort of middle path in terms of how much control you can really expect to beneficially exert over your day. So the advice here is to really try, assuming your professional situation allows it in any way at all, really try to ring-fence those 3-4 hours. Defend them. Try very hard not to be disturbable during that time. But also, and this is the flip side that’s just as important, not to try to do that with the rest of the time. Not to beat yourself up if the rest of the day is kind of scattered and all over the place. Not to become the kind of person who’s, like, snapping at your family and coworkers the rest of the time because because they want things that are not exactly what you were planning at that time. To be open to that serendipity, those chance encounters and eventualities you weren’t predicting, as well as defending this block where you’re really going to be able to make progress on the most focused kind of work.