Why it is so hard to stay focused these days—and what to do about it

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124018463826033223.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

by jseliger • 17 years ago

67 31 17 years ago

online.wsj.com

FraaJad2• 17 years ago

tl;dr

s_baar• 17 years ago

Hmm, I better scroll down to make sure no one else posted this... What font color is that? -8?!? Oh thank god...

FraaJad2• 17 years ago

Contrived efforts to keep the conversation serious had made people zealous with their down buttons.

chops2• 17 years ago

Mental attention, she notes, is selective. Like a flashlight beam, we aim our consciousness on but a thin slice of what surrounds us. At a party, for instance, we hear only one voice among many until another voice speaks our name and our attention suddenly shifts.

I find myself to be much the opposite. I have trouble focusing on on any one conversation, I'm too easily distracted. I can't hold a phone call or conversation while a TV is playing at similar volume. In a restaurant, I feel like I hear all conversations and the music, and I can't seem to shut them out. It's not that I'm listening to all the conversations, but I hear them, and it makes focusing on the conversation I'm trying to hold difficult.

With programming and reading, however, I do find that I can shut out background noise, and I suspect this is because it's a different kind of thinking than what distractions around would be causing.

I suspect that because the attention is given to a mode of thought (reading, programming), and that that mode is not competing with other forms of the same mode (I'm not trying to read two books simultaneously), that this enables someone (or maybe just me, I dunno) to shut off the other senses. While with listening and hearing multiple conversations, it's like trying to read and having random words getting thrown into the sentences you're reading.

thalur• 17 years ago

I know what you mean - I have the same problem. For me, it's worst with television: I can't have a conversation with someone if there's a TV on in the same room. I'm not sure if this is the opposite to the flashlight simile, or just an example of an inability to direct it at will.

chops2• 17 years ago

I'm glad I'm not alone :)

Interestingly, I find that this tends to affect the men of my family more than the women. My mom, sister, and wife don't seem to have this problem at all. While both my dad and brother all suffer from an inability to hold a conversation if the TV is on.

Of course, that's a pretty small sample set.

silentbicycle• 17 years ago

Well, television (particularly ad-supported television) is actively trying over and over to grab your attention, so it's not terribly surprising. I have a hard time focusing when there's a tv in line-of-sight, too, and it gets worse when I haven't watched broadcast tv for a while.

I remember hearing somebody (Douglas Rushkoff, I think) suggest that ADD-like behaviors might be an adaptation to a childhood in which one is inundated with aggressive, flashy advertising. Adapting to reflexively ignoring things that are designed to steal your focus probably affects your brain in the long term, much like meditating regularly can.

greggraham• 17 years ago

I have the same problem, so I've had to do things to cope with it. Fortunately, I have an office with a door at my work now, and that helps tremendously. At home I have a room to work in where I can shut the door and not hear the TV. When I need to concentrate, I shut down the Twitter, E-mail, and IM clients, and any other things on my computer that might be distracting. I only run programs related to the task at hand.

I have also found that a daily time of quiet prayer and meditation is helpful. If you don't believe in prayer, some other kind of meditation will probably help, too. Lately I've been incorporating MP3s from pray-as-you-go.org, which are very well done short sessions of Ignatian guided meditation incorporating beautiful music.

etal• 17 years ago

Foreground versus background processes probably makes a better metaphor. It is possible to truly multitask, beyond just franticly switching focus -- we do it when we drive or play sports -- but only one task actually has focus. The rest runs in the background. Learning to control that ability is a great way to manage your time and attention.

I'm pretty helpless with group conversations, too. I guess conversation uses a lot of different aspects of attention, so you can't just fire off background tasks for listening to music and each conversation.

As for the people who can do concurrent conversations -- I think they're very good at filling in the gaps of each conversation that they miss. If each conversation is mostly small talk and little stories, you can lose a few words from each sentence and still follow along, especially if you can pick up on voice inflection and body language in your background tasks (as our more socially adept girlfriends and sisters seem to).

edw519• 17 years ago

Nice article, but like many things, this just touches the surface and adds little enlightment.

Being really good at many things, especially programming, requires deep involvement. This is the polar opposite of "posing".

It's easy to pose and talk about eyeballs or algorithms or third normal form. But tell me what data is in column 4, which programs change it under which conditions, and what that effects. That takes deep understanding. Which takes focus.

If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

kamme• 17 years ago

I must admit I like having some time off too, away from all those distractions. But on the other hand, if I don't have my cellphone, emails, meetings, ... I often feel out of control because I don't know the status of issues.

I like to think there is a time for everything, and as said in the article, I think people with ADD sometimes just don't manage that time correctly. Of course I'm not saying ADD doesn't exist, but sometimes I do think it seems to be(come) a real buzzword for some people.

And it seems logical to me people tend to find it hard to be focused, we are living in a fast world, maybe sometimes too fast and demanding...

tokenadult• 17 years ago

The Richard Wiseman color-changing card trick

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voAntzB7EwE

is a good example of selective attention.

dgallagher3• 17 years ago

Rob May* wrote this three years ago about the same topic:

Is Concentration the New Competitive Advantage?: http://www.businesspundit.com/is-concentration-the-new-compe...

He goes onto saying how reading every Digg post, or looking at every new Web 2.0 startup is basically a complete waist of time.

You feel like you're actually learning something, but in reality the info you're learning is "junk" knowledge (unless you're a VC looking for an investment opportunity - but by the time it hits TechCrunch or Digg, it's probably too late to invest anyway).

*Rob no longer writes for BusinessPundit.com. He's at CoconutHeadsets.com now.

keopi• 17 years ago

Yeah, I had a similar thought thinking how Hacker News was distracting me from the work I should be focusing on.

gcheong• 17 years ago

I'm beginning to think the value of HN is to give you something to do after you've sold your startup.

frossie• 17 years ago

The HN "noprocrast" feature is there for a reason. Use it.

psyklic• 17 years ago

concentration was always the competitive advantage!

jseliger• 17 years ago

I'm the original submitter and also wrote about the distraction issue in the context of students and laptops in this post: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-di... . I've just bookmarked May's post for future reference.

dgallagher3• 17 years ago

I didn't mean to post Rob's blog to discredit your submission of the link in any way. Sorry if I came across like that. Thanks for posting the link, I enjoyed reading it! And great article on your blog too! :)

chris11• 17 years ago

"You feel like you're actually learning something, but in reality the info you're learning is "junk" knowledge"

That is a great descriptor. You can read interesting stories and expert advice in no time at all. But that doesn't mean you know how to apply that advice or even use it. And if you don't use the knowledge, you will have probably learned very little and wasted your time.

mjfern• 17 years ago

The article mentions the concept of "flow." This concept is described in detail in the book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I highly recommend this book!

http://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Mihaly-Csik...

puzzle-out• 17 years ago

In my experience, there is no point doing anything unless you spend at least twenty minutes just getting into it first. This is how long it takes me to get into a 'concentration/focus' zone.

FlorinAndrei2• 17 years ago

My recipe for efficient writing:

- Put laptop in backpack

- Go someplace where you can be "lonely in a crowd" (e.g. local coffee shop)

- Log out of your Google home page, so all those applets won't claim your attention all the time

- Don't even think of touching anything in the bookmarks

- Keep the email client turned off

- Turn cell phone off too if you must

- Get a nice large latte (either regular or decaf)

- Fire up the text editor

- Let your mind take off

Voila, instant productivity. I get into the "flow" pretty quickly that way.

rjett• 17 years ago

On a similar, yet somewhat unrelated note,I often catch my own mind working like a search engine. When there's something that I'm trying to recall, for instance the contents of an article I read a couple months ago, I know exactly where I can find the article and I remember whether I thought the article was good or bad, but I often times find that I don't remember a lot of the details of the article. In short, I remember the location, the subject, and the relevance of stuff, but I find it hard to remember specific contents.

esila• 17 years ago

Back when I first started programming, a peer highly recommended to me to take a martial art. It didn't matter which one - the only requirement was that it had to require discipline and focus. Training in a martial art is a wonderful way to induce "flow" - get distracted during a sparring session, and the consequences can "hurt" a bit more than just time wasted.

Why it is so hard to stay focused these days—and what to do about it

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