Distractibility, Part II
In Which We All Pretend I’m a Brain Scientist
Good morning—or afternoon, or evening. I’m not telling you when you should read Shelf Life. I’m not the boss of you. Today in Shelf Life, the promised strategies to mitigate distraction and maybe even eliminate it, so you can spend more time doing the things you want to be doing, or know you ought to be doing, but from which you find yourself chronically distracted.
In Tuesday’s Shelf Life, I talked about “behavior chains,” the sequence of:
Trigger
Thought
Action
Consequence
An example I used Tuesday was:
Trigger: A challenging moment in my writing session causes me discomfort.
Thought: “Hey, you know what’s not challenging and uncomfortable?”
Action: I open up instagram to look at videos of dogs.
Consequence: Distracted.
In the case of being distracted from what you are trying to focus on, it’s that item number four, the consequence, that we’re ultimately trying to avoid. Logically, then, we could interrupt the behavior chain anywhere before the consequence and avoid the distraction. This means we would have to:
Avoid or negate the trigger;
Interrupt the thought; or
Prevent the action from happening.
Avoid or Negate the Trigger
Okay. Sometimes you can avoid or negate the trigger and sometimes you cannot. That’s because sometimes the trigger is an inherent part of the thing you’re doing; for instance if a distraction trigger for me is running into something difficult or challenging in my writing process, I can’t reasonably avoid that if I’m writing. If you can’t do anything about the trigger in a certain situation, you move on to the thought. But let’s talk about avoiding triggers first.
I was just talking with a colleague this week about the easiest work productivity hack I know, which is to shut down my work email for an hour or two because of this behavior chain:
Trigger: Email notification pops up.
Thought: “That might be important.”
Action: I stop the task I am currently engaged in to read my email.
Consequence: Distracted.
Many people think they can effectively multitask but few people actually can. Instead, most people task switch, meaning they switch back and forth rapidly between tasks instead of working on both simultaneously. Anytime you task switch there’s at least a little bit of time lost because you have to reengage with the task you’re switching to: Remember where you left off, what you need to do next, and so on.
I get dozens of work emails each day, meaning that email notification pops up several times per hour. If I stop my task four times each hour to read and possibly respond to email, everything takes longer. Answering the emails take longer than they would if I were focusing on email, and doing the task takes longer than if I were focusing on it. If it takes me 20 minutes out of each hour to read, triage, and answer my incoming email, I’m much better off doing it all at once instead of four different times for five minutes each.
To avoid this trigger, I can simply close my email client for forty minutes; work on my task without the distraction of the email notification popping up; and then stop my task, open my email client, and handle email for 20 minutes. This is a more efficient way to get both things done than to switch back and forth throughout the 60 minutes.
Sometimes I suggest this and people will say, “But I can’t close my email client for 40 minutes, I might miss something critical.” Oh my gosh are you the president of the United States? What emails are you getting that are so important and urgent they can’t wait 40 minutes? Truthfully, sometimes I get emails that can’t wait 40 minutes, but I get those emails during times when I know there are high-priority, time-sensitive tasks afoot and those are times when I do not close my email client. There’s also the telephone if something is so urgent it can’t wait till the top of the hour.
All this is to say, sometimes the gut reaction to avoiding the trigger is, “No I can’t possibly!” because we’re so used to doing things a certain way and changing the way we do things is uncomfortable. But if you want a different result than what you’re getting now, you have to change something. Even if it’s uncomfortable.
Interrupt the Thought
Speaking of being uncomfortable, get ready for the therapy segment of today’s Shelf Life.
If you can’t do anything about the trigger in the behavior chain, your next option is to interrupt the resulting thought so it doesn’t cause the action and, then, the consequence. To interrupt the thought, you have to catch yourself thinking it. To catch yourself thinking it, you have to understand why you have it in the first place.
Think about why you might become uncomfortable during a task and how that discomfort causes distraction. For instance, an example from literally today: I’m at my desk typing away and I have my office door closed. It was chilly outside early this morning so the heat was running. My office is small and it heats up fast.
Trigger: Temperature in my office rises.
Thought: “Yikes, I’m sweating. Why is it so hot?”
Action: I get up and open my office door.
Consequence: Heat begins to dissipate.
That’s an example of physical discomfort from an external source distracting me from my work. I was uncomfortably hot so I had to get up and do something about it. Same thing if I had a splitting headache or I get hungry. I’m physically uncomfortable and so I stop paying attention to work so I can pay attention to my physical need. Meet the physical need, address the source of distraction, resume work.
But I am primarily talking about the mental discomfort that sometimes comes along with working on a task, like a work project, or writing, composing music, drawing, creating anything, and so on. What are the causes of discomfort that come from the task itself?
“The task is hard.” Okay but sometimes a task is hard in a fun way and the challenge of tackling it is enjoyable. Other times a task is hard and brain goes into avoidance mode and tells you to go down to the kitchen and make a milkshake. The task being hard can cause the discomfort but is not, itself, the true source of discomfort. If a task is difficult and causing your brain to seek a distraction from it, a possible source of the discomfort is the fear that you will fail at the task.
Brain: “I’m not sure we’ll be able to complete this task successfully.”
Brain: “You know what we can do successfully?”
You: “Wait did I leave dishes in the sink?”
Fear is a big demotivator in creative work because creatives have to make themselves so vulnerable to create something from nothing. You have to take your own thoughts and ideas and put them into a fixed form that can be observed and judged by others, which is terrifying. Like, listen, I want my story to exist, I don’t want it to be perceived.
Anyway, a lot of times the discomfort that causes the brain to seek a distraction is fear. Other times, it’s boredom. Anxiety. Frustration.
The best way to interrupt that thought before it leads to distraction is to understand what it is; identify it. If you’re writing away and suddenly begin to wonder whether the name you chose for that character 20 pages ago is really the ideal name for them, or whether you could come up with an even more perfect name, and you start researching names all over again—stop. Pause and ask yourself what took you out of the writing and redirected your brain to a different, easier task. Be transparent with yourself. Is it that you don’t know where to go next in the story? You don’t know how to express the thing you want to say? The last few paragraphs started going off the rails and the text isn’t coming out how you planned?
Identify the feeling that caused the discomfort. Doing so doesn’t make it less uncomfortable but it does make you aware of why you’re seeking a distraction. Once you’re aware, you can choose whether to seek a distraction to give yourself a break, or whether to redirect back to the work and power through.
Prevent the Action
On the one hand, I think it’s always better to stop the chain of events earlier in the chain. However, preventing the action is sometimes the easiest way to avoid the consequence. As I said above, you can remove or negate some triggers but not all of them. Some triggers will still happen. And interrupting the thought is the hardest point at which to stop the behavior chain. Stopping yourself from thinking something is way harder than stopping yourself from doing something.
To prevent the action, first understand what your go-to avoidance actions are. Maybe you do housework. Maybe you open social media and start scrolling. Maybe you take a nap. Maybe some combination of multiple things. Try making a list of the things you do that take you away from the task you are trying to work on.
Once you have that list, consider the precursor actions of each action. Here’s my list:
I text the group chat on my phone.
I tidy the kitchen.
I play a round of Minesweeper.
Each of these things has a precursor action (probably several if I’m honest):
Before I can text the group chat, I must pick up my phone.
Before I can tidy the kitchen, I must stand up and leave my office.
Before I can play a round of Minesweeper, I must minimize my word processor and open the game.
If I can catch myself doing the precursor action, I can stop and Uno reverse it before I complete the action and get distracted. Here are some things I might do to help me catch the precursor action:
Stick a note to my office door that I’ll see if I stand up and try to leave my office.
Move my phone outside of easy reach so I have to leave my chair to pick it up.
Lock my phone in a timed lockbox.
Use an app locker that prevents opening certain programs.
Use a browser extension that blocks distracting websites.
None of these things will prevent me from doing the action that distracts me. I can disable my app locker, get my phone out of the lockbox, or ignore the sticky note on my door. The idea is to help me notice the unconscious beginning of the distraction action so I can choose to reengage with my task.
Importantly, I might also choose to take a break. There’s nothing wrong with stepping away from work for a bit when you’re tired, frustrated, unsure where to go next, or bored. Taking breaks is great and, honestly, I get past a lot of creative blocks when I’m in the shower or doing house chores and the creative task is on the back burner. Remember, none of these are strategies to learn to work forever without pausing. These are strategies to prevent distraction from taking you unawares so you can be in charge of when you stop working on something.
Your brain thinks it’s untouchable up there in the bone-armored cockpit from which it pilots your mortal coil like a flesh Gundam. Show it who’s boss.
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