Aiming for 100% focus, 100% of the time.
Music follows me wherever I go. I work listening to music, I take a shower listening to music, I eat lunch listening to music, and I certainly can’t go running without the soothing sounds of music. My wife and kids always know where I am in the house from the faint sound of music that emanates from the iPhone in my back pocket. As I work, I always believed music to sharpen my focus and allow an absolute state of concentration — music blocks out any other noisy distractions. But recently I began to think that listening to music was maybe the ultimate distraction. While appearing ‘muzak’ like in its presence, perhaps it was actually the biggest polluter of clear and focused thought.
I spoke about focus in my last post ( http://bit.ly/focushabit) and how this has become the new goal — or more accurately, the attainment of absolute concentration has become the goal. This led me not to look at the specific act of focus but the distractions that caused the glitches in the pursuit of ‘thought clarity’. The removal of distractions will bring about increased clarity and awareness. So I started looking at all the distractions in my day-to-day activities. I read somewhere that the brain is the single biggest consumer of energy in the body, so I’m sure that the distraction percentage of that ‘brain drain’ is considerable. This is especially true with the omnipresence of worry, thinking about the next task, thoughts on what to cook for dinner and ‘digital distraction’. This is on top of the invited distractions of music, ad-hoc complaining and looking at the guy across the road tending to his chilli plants. This entertaining, if not toxic, concoction is a recipe for a fried brain even before any work is completed.
The apparent distractions like social media and gazing out of the window are easily remedied, you just stop doing it. The subtlest distractions might be the most challenging to pin down and stop doing. My ‘listening’ to music is probably far from actually listening. I don’t tend to listen to just music while working, but I often listen to the radio or podcasts. Listening to podcasts while I work is the ultimate way of killing two birds with one stone — being productive at work while ingesting incredible insights from some of the worlds thought leaders. Although while working and trying to focus I often found myself being distracted from the task at hand by what was being fed into my conscious brain. Not to mention my unconscious brain deciphering and embedding information for use at a later date. These inevitable bouts of mind wandering often cause frustration and a massively reduced success level in learning and productivity through my work. This is especially true if I am on a deadline and need to seriously attend to the detail of the project I am working on.
I am still achieving my work goals while being distracted, but the regular wanderings of the mind mean sometimes-losing track and then trying to regain focus, which is a real hindrance. This increases the time spent on tasks that can be achieved more efficiently and can also be just a little bit frustrating — mainly because there is less progress in learning and growing as a creative.
So I started to work in ‘painful’ silence. The only sound is the birds singing and the clicks and taps of my mouse and keyboard. It felt like some kind of withdrawal from a 20year obsession of listening to the radio. Removing this seemingly innocuous ‘muzak’ from the equation allowed me to work in much more productive and creative bursts throughout the day. By becoming more effective at reducing distraction I am able to use that improved brain capacity to harness and practice my ability to ‘limelight’ the object of my focus at any one time. I am attempting improved growth and learning in my own simple way, but this pursuit has become revelationary. I’m not entirely sure any of it is based on scientific fact, or just new ways of doing things. Nonetheless, it is enlightening and drives me forward to pose further questions and as I try out new methods of working. This is all in the interest of learning and inspiring the creative process.
This new rich vein of enlightenment led me to think about distraction in other activities — meaning every other part of my day, my ‘creative ecosystem’ (post: http://bit.ly/2g3RnH1). Cooking forms an important part of my day and my fingers show the many scars from the cuts of many a distracted moment while prepping food. So I tried not listening to music while I prepped lunch and dinner. It allowed me to be much more ‘in the zone’ with what I’m doing and I have thus reduced the potential for bloody mishaps. Not having to scrabble around for a plaster while trying to stop the flow is the ultimate distraction. Incidentally, I often wonder who designed the little paper sleeves plasters come in, such an impractical design, but maybe that’s a different subject for another article.
Anyway, so I stopped listening to music while I worked and while I cooked and pretty much everything else. The only time I listen to music or the radio is when I am listening to music or radio — just that, and nothing else. The next thing to look at was reading. I always read while I eat lunch, as I saw this as downtime and an excellent opportunity to pack in some more insight. My modus operandi is to cram as much into a day as possible (I am also tackling this). Hence doing two things at once seemed logical and productive, especially if it was being added to a ‘must do’ endeavour like eating. If I am able to eat and at the same time ingest the clever words of a thought leader or supreme novelist surely that’s preferable over just eating. Well, that was entirely misguided. I really do love good food, but often after eating lunch while reading, I would have very little recollection about the dish I had just eaten other than the taste of the first few mouthfuls. Equally the snippets of knowledge or clever prose that I gleaned from reading were probably diluted by my blind mastication. Now eating is about eating and enjoying, reading is about reading and enjoying. I’ve even stopped listening to music while I clean my teeth — I’m getting to grips with focusing solely on the task at hand as opposed to being distracted. Quite enjoyable really.
My focus on focus is not the focus?! Moreover focus is a welcome by-product of not being distracted. I think that if I teach my distracted brain not to be diverted; this will then create the best possible state of mind for improved awareness and focus — aiming at 100% focus 100% of the time.
Productivity and creativity in work is the obvious theme here but removing distraction from every aspect of my day has already led to enormous and ongoing rewards. If something distracts me from the task at hand, it gets removed from the equation. In other words, the only thing I am focusing on when I am doing stuff is the thing I am doing. Whether it’s talking to the kids, walking the dog, cleaning my teeth or cooking the dinner — that’s what I’m doing, and only that. The ‘invited’ distractions like listening to music, checking my iPhone are no longer welcome to the party. That’s relatively easy, the next thing is to further train the brain not to go into its default distraction mode and bring the mind back into focusing on any one task. I tend to play the sound in my mind of a stylus skidding across a vinyl album and arriving at silence. This quells the rise of the distracting thought and quickly brings my mind back into focus. This works particularly well with stubborn thought distractions. I have yet to go running without listening to music — this may be well the ultimate challenge as the ‘pain’ will be undiluted.
That may well be the 100% focus I am running away from?
