Stop Obsessing About Focus: Here’s What Your Mind Really Needs
By: Sílvia Bastos
Tags: Productivity, Meditation, Mindfulness, Creativity, Procrastination

Avoiding Distractions and Doing Work You Love

Nowadays, productivity and personal development niches seem to place a disproportionate amount of importance on our ability to focus.

As a freelance writer and entrepreneur, I thought that the key to success was to “get in the flow” every day, to choose the most focus-inducing and distraction-free writing app on the market, or to zero in on my goals and never let go until I achieve them.

So for a long time, I tried to force my distractions away in order to stay focused.

Of course, this didn’t work.

You’re probably heard of Dostoyevsky’s claim that trying not to think about a polar bear will only make you think about it more often than ever.

More recently, social psychologist Daniel Wegner took this even further. He conducted a study where a group of people were told not to think of a polar bear for five minutes. Not only did they think about it on average once per minute, but later, when told to intentionally conjure its image, they did so more often than a group who hadn’t previously been told to suppress it.

In other words, trying to suppress distractions from your awareness can actually damage your focus and make you more distracted.

So how can we effectively deal with distractions?

Although it may sound counterintuitive, an effective alternative to suppressing distractions is to purposefully remain aware of them, so that you can spot them on time and keep them from disrupting your focus.

To do this, choose a task that you want to focus on for a specific amount of time, such as writing, mowing the lawn, or doing your taxes.

Then, before you begin, commit to focus your attention on your chosen activity, but at the same time keep your awareness open to potentially distracting elements.

Let’s say you set a timer for one hour and focus on writing an article.

Your attention is directed at the words you’re writing and the thought processes that originate the necessary ideas, sentences, and arguments.

However, as you do that, try to remain aware of anything that might trigger a distraction.

Usually, it all starts with an emotion.

For example, as you struggle with writing a difficult sentence, you might feel frustrated or bored, which might turn into an urge to open a new tab on your browser, and suddenly you end up scrolling through Facebook, all in a matter of seconds.

Dr. Tim Pychyl, professor of the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Ottawa, explains that “procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem”. In a 2013 study, Dr. Pychyl and Dr. Sirois describe procrastination as being a method of short-term mood repair. In other words, we procrastinate as a quick way to escape unpleasant emotions, such as boredom or anger.

Therefore, in order to avoid the lure of distractions, you need to be aware of your emotional triggers.

Distractions might also originate in external stimuli (the smell of food makes you want to eat), or even diverging into secondary thoughts that are related to your current task (a word you don’t know, which leads you into a Google search rabbit hole).

These triggers make you forget your task, and then divert your attention to something else — therefore creating a distraction.

Your aim is to keep your awareness open to identify these processes as they happen. At first, you might only notice them after they’ve already happened. But as your mental skills develop, you will gradually catch yourself earlier and earlier. When you spot the beginning of a distraction, gently but diligently redirect your attention to your chosen task.

We can also use awareness to optimize our work by adapting it to our current circumstances or natural rhythms.

For example, after a long time of observing my energy level patterns at work and asking myself questions like “why do I feel so tired?” or “when was the last time I felt like this?”, I came to adapt my schedule to my circadian rhythm and my menstrual cycle. That has been much more effective than simply trying to push through or using social media binges as a way to compensate for burnout.

Focus is important, but its effectiveness is limited on its own.

Everything we do is much more complex than the task we’re currently focused on: each of our actions is always inserted within a context and environment, and our choices are constantly influenced by our thoughts, our sensations, and our emotions. Therefore, productivity is not a matter of control: instead, it’s a matter of awareness, and the possibilities we open once we can see wider and further.