How to focus on the task at hand: Taming the monkey mind
What do you think is your biggest distraction when you are in the zone, deeply focused on a task:
Facebook — No
Whatsapp — No
Email — No
It’s your own brain.
Has it ever happened to you that you are in the middle of a task and suddenly your brain pops an idea for a previous task which is completely unrelated to your current work?
“I should invest in Nifty 50.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell my husband to get vegetables.”
“I shouldn’t have spoken to my colleague in the way that I did.”
Why does this happen?
Why can’t our brain focus on one thing at a time?
I am not sure why exactly our brain behaves like a monkey jumping from one thought to another. Maybe this was an evolutionary advantage, but clearly, it’s not anymore. Let’s see how.
If your current task is interrupted by an unrelated idea then there are two possible outcomes:
1. Either you suspend your current work and follow the new idea or,
2. You hold the new idea for later and continue your current task.
There are cons to both these paths:
Few cons related to path 1: You pause your current work and play with the new idea.
1. Future context switch:
Let understand this with an example. You are writing code for a program and you are at line 50. To write the next line you need to have an idea of the context from the starting and also what the final objective is. If you paused this work and are restarting then you would have to gather all of this before you can even write a line.
If you pause your current work and jump to the new idea, then you would end up paying a price when you jump back. This is known as “Context switch”. You would have to think again about where exactly you were in your work, gather the right prerequisites and the thoughts before continuing the work.
2. Losing the Zone: You might have been in the state of utmost focus aka “in the zone” when the idea would have popped and you decided to leave your zone to pursue it. Most of us would agree that getting in the Zone is a tough task. So good luck with getting the same state back.
At a glance, the above might look like a small price to pay but if you have experienced and experimented with them, then you would know the difficulty associated with these.
Few cons related to path 2: You instructed your brain to hold the idea and focused back at your work.
By the time you are done with your task, either you don’t remember the idea or you do. Both are not good.
- You might forget the billion dollar idea.
That could have been a life-changing idea for you. You thought your brain would hold it until you finish your task but you were wrong. Now you can only be sad at your misfortune.
2. You remember the idea.
Your brain did a great task at holding the idea while you focused on your current task (or were you focused?)
2a) I like to think our mind is like a computer with a fixed amount of RAM.
At a given time in life, the amount of RAM a person has is constant.
A highly cognitive task (Deep work that needs focus) would require almost your entire RAM just like playing a heavy game on your computer requires a lot of RAM. If while playing the game you also run a video on the side, it will need some RAM from your game and hence reduce its performance. Similarly, if you have thoughts/ideas interrupting your current work then in the metaphor of computer science, they are taking up some of your RAM, which was needed to finish your current task. So if you are holding some ideas in your head then you are not in the Zone/focused.
2b) Once an interruption, always an interruption:
Once I was working on an important deadline and suddenly I remembered that my wife’s birthday was due in a couple of days and I needed to plan for it. No matter how hard I tried to resist the urge to go on the tangent, my brain kept popping ideas of destinations, events, decorations etc related to the surprise party that I needed to host. There began the chain of constant interruption.
If you choose to control your feelings and suppress the distraction then you are in for a ride. Turns out the brain doesn’t let go of things so easily.
It’s as if the brain is a mother and the interrupting idea her child. The mother doesn’t want her baby to be lost and hence keeps nagging our current flow.
So once an interruption, always an interruption.
There is a third path which is so far the best solution.
Pause your current work and quickly noteyour distractions, in detail, in a safelocation. Then continue your work.
To clearly understand why the third path is better, let’s talk about a piece from Psychology.
Zeigarnik effect:
People remember in-completed tasks better than completed tasks.
A waiter remembers many orders until he serves all of it.
Students who rely on rote memorization, forget the content as soon as the exam gets over.
When you ask your brain to hold on to an idea, you have given it importance, your brain is going to treat it as an incomplete task and so it will assign RAM to it and like a mother, keep reminding you about it.
But, once you safely note your interrupting thoughts in a notebook or some app which you know is a safe haven for such ideas and future tasks, the constant nagging of the mother brain is going to stop.
She will know that her baby is in the right hands and will be addressed in some time. The task wouldn’t be seen as incomplete.
I use Wunderlist for this purpose. It is a note taking the app just like any other. I have it on my phone and laptop and I note all my interrupting thoughts in its inbox.
This is how it looks.
This small tool is very powerful.
I keep dumping all my ideas and tasks in its inbox and review at a weekly level where I organize them in various lists.
Some situations where I use Wunderlist
How to use Wunderlist effectively is a talk for another session but let’s focus on some situations where we should use it.
- You are in the middle of a task and an idea comes up.
- Your colleague tells you about a new task that would help you but you currently don’t have the bandwidth to execute it.
- You are meeting your manager/colleague and you get lots of insights and feedback. Having Wunderlist open for meetings is a must have.
- You are at a social gathering and somebody suggests a nice book that they read or a nice restaurant they went to.
- A colleague mailed you a doc/article that you should read but you are in the middle of something. Hurry! Note it.
- You suddenly remember a feedback to give to your colleague. Note it down.
The boon which also is the bane.
Apart from keeping your brain at peace another boon of the process is that no idea will slip through the cracks.
But this is the bane too. Since you miss nothing, so your to-dos list keeps on increasing, beyond your capabilities to catch up. To deal with this you need to develop another skill, the art of leaving, i.e. how to prioritize tasks and leave the unimportant ones, something which we will talk about later.
Bottom line: Mind is like a monkey that wants to jump on every vine that it sees and it is constantly on the lookout, even when you think you are deeply focused. The best thing to do when you get distracted is to quickly noteyour distractions, in detail, in a safelocation.
Reference books:
1. Thinking fast and slow
2. Art of thinking clearly
3. Getting things done
4. 7 habits of highly effective people.