How To Become Good At Distraction

If you aimed to improve your stamina in the next 6 months, what would you do? You’d partake in aerobic exercises (i.e. running, swimming, hiking, dancing, boxing, etc.) with consistency and then slowly increase its frequency or intensity over time. This format for incremental improvement applies to most of our other endeavors. Want to read more? Start with 10 pages, don’t miss a day, and then go from there. Want to learn how to drive? Get in the driver’s seat, drive every morning, and then drive in the midst of regular traffic. It’s simple: start, practice regularly, achieve the goal.

Now, want to become good at distraction?

You get the point. The reason we are so distracted is that we practice distraction every day without fail. Every time a notification from Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp pops up, we behave like good slaves ready to serve our masters — answering every time they call, completing that immediate task before we get to other work, and constantly checking in to see if they need us. We have become Pavlovian dogs.

Let’s assume we made no changes to our lifestyle in the past one year. It is likely that we are more distracted — or addicted — today because social media platforms are better at their game this year — and will be better next year. They are smarter about using behavioral psychology to keep us hooked through dopamine-driven feedback loops. How many times have we mindlessly scrolled through our Facebook homepage? For some, a better question may be the inverse: how many times haven’t we…?

Outside of social media, we can get better at the art of distraction by surrounding ourselves with more. More subscriptions. More activities. More things. We should say “yes” to all plans friends propose and avoid any downtime to reflect. The key is busyness, not productivity.

Being distracted is an easy state of existence. It requires minimal mental effort. It feels good. Just surrender to the cravings and forget about delayed gratification. Since it takes twenty minutes to re-focus but less than one minute to lose focus, it is also easy for The Distracted to become The Perennially Distracted.

The age of unprecedented access to information and knowledge comes with its own challenges. They are exacerbated by the omnipresent distraction bug that is now deeply planted within us. We satiate it. We feed it with persistent glances towards our notification screen. We let it consume us. We let it defeat us.

This also means that those who avoid such a fate — simply avoid falling into this looped trap — will be outperformers. It is a blessing for this rare group to compete with The Distracted.

As Warren Buffett once said, “the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”

Why?

Alexander Graham Bell explains: “Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”