18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done (19 page)

T
he screaming started a few minutes before breakfast. As far as I could tell, our two-year-old son, Daniel, took our then-seven-year-old daughter Isabelle’s markers from her while she was drawing. And if you don’t think that’s a big deal, then you don’t have kids.

I tried my typical parenting monologue: “I can see you’re very upset; he’s two years old, sweetie, and he doesn’t know any better; the picture is beautiful just as it is; you needed to stop drawing anyway, it was time for breakfast; you have lots of other markers; okay, that’s enough—stop crying.” Nothing worked.

And then I recalled some research I had read.

“Isabelle,” I asked, “is that a new T-shirt you’re wearing?”

“Yes,” she said, still crying.

“Who’s that on the front?”

She looked at her shirt. “Obama.” She wasn’t crying now.

“What? No way. It’s a woman! Does Obama wear a pearl necklace?” I asked.

She laughed.

The research I recalled was the famous marshmallow experiment conducted on four-year-old children in the 1960s by Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. He put a marshmallow on a table in front of a child and said he needed to leave the room for a few minutes. The child was welcome to eat the one marshmallow while he was gone, but if he or she could wait until he returned, he would give the child two marshmallows. Then he left, and the hidden video camera captured the rest.

Dr. Mischel was interested in what enabled some children to delay gratification while others surrendered to it. Most kids succumbed in less than three minutes. Some, however, made it the full twenty minutes until the researcher returned. And as it turns out, they were rewarded with more than just an extra marshmallow. As follow-up research later discovered, these kids had better relationships, were more dependable, and even scored an average of 210 points higher on their SATs than the children who couldn’t resist the marshmallow.

So what’s the secret of the ones who held out? Did they have more willpower? Better discipline? Maybe they didn’t like candy as much? Perhaps they were afraid of authority?

It turns out it was none of these things. It was a technique. The same technique I used with Isabelle.

Distraction.

Rather than focusing on not eating the marshmallow,
they covered their eyes, sat under the table, or sang a song. They didn’t resist the urge. They simply avoided it.

We face two challenges as we try to manage our behavior: the challenge of initiative (exercise, make one more sales phone call, work another hour on that presentation, write that proposal), and the challenge of restraint (don’t eat that cookie, don’t speak so much in that meeting, don’t yell back, don’t solve your employee’s problem for him).

If we’re good at the challenge of initiative, it means we’re good at applying ourselves, at focusing, at breaking through resistance using sheer willpower. In other words, we’re good at avoiding distraction.

Which, as the experiments show, is exactly what leads us to fail in the challenge of restraint. Focusing on resisting the temptation only makes it harder to resist. In the case of not eating the cookie, using willpower only makes it more likely that we’ll eat the cookie. Or speak too much in the meeting. Or yell back.

Try this experiment: For the next ten seconds, don’t think about a big white elephant. Go ahead. Try it. Just make sure you don’t think about a white elephant.

Impossible, right? The trick is to distract yourself by focusing on something else entirely.

The rule is simple: When you want to do something, focus. When you don’t want to do something, distract.

Distraction has a bad rap. It’s seen as something that prevents you from achieving your goals. We
get
distracted.
Focus, on the other hand, is seen as positive and active—something you do to achieve your goals.

But the skill of distraction is important now more than ever. We are living in an age of fear—terrorism, global warming, child kidnappings, a volatile economy—that reduces our productivity at best and destroys our health, relationships, and happiness at worst.

Unfortunately, the more we feel afraid, the more we read about the source of our fear as we try to protect ourselves. Afraid of losing your job or your nest egg? Chances are you’re following the market closely and reading more articles about the economy than ever before. According to a recent poll released by the National Sleep Foundation, one-third of Americans are losing sleep over personal financial concerns and the poor condition of the U.S. economy.

The solution? Distraction. Read a great book. Watch a movie. Play with a four-year-old. Cook and eat a meal with good friends. Go for a walk. Throw yourself into work.

Distraction is, in fact, the same thing as focus. To distract yourself from X you need to focus on Y.

The CEO of a midsize company complained to me about Phillip, one of his direct reports, a senior leader who was micromanaging his team.

“Does Phillip have any particular passions you know about?” I asked.

“The environment,” he responded.

I asked him if that issue was also important to the company, and he said it was.

“Great,” I said. “Start a task force to address environmental issues and opportunities at the company, and ask Phillip to lead the effort.”

He looked worried. “Won’t that distract him from his day-to-day responsibilities?”

I smiled. “I hope so.”

I
was on a conference call—the executive committee of a not-for-profit board on which I sit—and decided to send an email to a client.

I know, I know. You’d think I’d have learned.

In
chapter 32
, “The One-Two Punch,” I wrote about the dangers of multitasking—using a cell phone while driving—and I proposed a way to stop.

But right now I wasn’t in a car. I was safe. At my desk. What could go wrong?

Well, I sent him the email. Then I had to send him another one, this time with the attachment I had forgotten to append. Finally, my third email to him explained why that attachment wasn’t what he was expecting. When I eventually refocused on the call, I realized I hadn’t heard a question the chair of the board had asked me. I swear I wasn’t smoking anything.

But I might as well have been. A study showed that
people distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a ten-point fall in their IQ. What’s the impact of a ten-point drop? The same result as losing a night of sleep. More than twice the effect of smoking marijuana.

Doing several things at once is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we’re getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40 percent, because we don’t—and can’t—multitask. We switch-task. Rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, losing time in the process.

You might think you’re different. That you’ve done it so much you’ve become good at it. Practice makes perfect and all that.

But you’d be wrong. The research shows that heavy multitaskers are less competent at it than light multitaskers. In other words, in contrast to almost everything else in your life, the more you multitask, the worse you are at it. Practice, in this rare case, works against you.

So I decided to experiment for a week. No multitasking. I wanted to see what happened, which techniques helped, and whether I could sustain it.

For the most part, I succeeded. When I was on the phone, all I did was the phone. In a meeting, I did nothing but focus on the meeting. Any interruptions—email, phone, a knock on the door—I held off until I finished what I was working on.

When I emerged at the end of the week, I discovered six things:

First, it was delightful. I noticed this most dramatically
when I was with my children. I shut my cell phone off and found myself much more deeply engaged and present with them. I never realized how significantly a short moment of checking my email disengaged me from the people and things right there in front of me. Don’t laugh, but I actually—and for the first time in a while—noticed the beauty of leaves blowing in the wind.

Second, I made significant progress on challenging projects. The kind that require thought and persistence. The kind I usually try to distract myself from, like writing or strategizing. Since I refused to allow myself to get distracted, I stayed with them when they got hard, and experienced a number of breakthroughs.

Third, my stress level dropped dramatically. The research shows that multitasking isn’t just inefficient, it’s also stressful. And I found that to be true. It was a relief to do one thing at a time. I felt liberated from the strain of keeping so many balls in the air at each moment. It felt reassuring to finish one thing before going to the next.

Fourth, I lost all patience for things I felt were not a good use of my time. An hour-long meeting seemed interminably long, and a meandering, pointless conversation was excruciating. In other words, I became laser-focused on getting things done. Since I wasn’t doing anything else, I got bored much more quickly. I had no tolerance for wasted time.

Fifth, I had tremendous patience for things I felt were useful and enjoyable. When I listened to Eleanor, I was
in no rush. When I was brainstorming a difficult problem, I stuck with it. Nothing else was competing for my attention, so I was able to settle into the one thing I was doing.

Sixth, and perhaps most important, there was no downside. Nothing was lost by not multitasking. No projects were left unfinished. No one became frustrated with me for not answering a call or failing to return an email the second I received it.

Which is why it’s surprising that multitasking is so hard to resist. If there’s no downside to stopping, why don’t we all just stop?

I think it’s because our minds move considerably faster than the outside world. You can hear far more words a minute than someone else can speak. We have so much to do, why waste any time? While you’re on the phone listening to someone, why not use that extra brainpower to book a trip to Florence?

What we neglect to realize is that we’re
already
using that brainpower to pick up nuance, think about what we’re hearing, access our creativity, and stay connected to what’s happening around us. What we neglect to realize is that it’s
not
extra brainpower. It may be imperceptible, but it’s all being used, right then and there, in the moment. And diverting it has negative consequences.

So how do we resist the temptation to multitask?

First, the obvious: The best way to avoid interruptions is to turn them off. Often when I’m writing, I’ll do
it at 6
AM
. when there’s nothing to distract me. I’ll disconnect my computer from its wireless connection, and I’ll turn my phone off. In my car, I’ll leave my phone in the trunk. Drastic? Maybe. But most of us shouldn’t trust ourselves.

Second, the less obvious: Use your loss of patience to your advantage. Create unrealistically short deadlines. Cut all meetings in half. Give yourself one-third the time you think you need to accomplish something.

Because there’s nothing like a deadline to keep things moving. And when things are moving fast, we can’t help but focus on them. How many people run a race while texting? If you truly have only thirty minutes to finish that presentation you thought would take an hour, are you really going to answer that call?

Interestingly, because multitasking is so stressful, single-tasking to meet a tight deadline will actually reduce your stress. In other words, giving yourself less time to do things could make you more productive
and
more relaxed.

Finally, it’s good to remember that we’re not perfect. Every once in a while, it might be okay to allow for a little multitasking. As I was finishing this chapter, Daniel, my two-year-old son, walked into my office, climbed on my lap, looked up at me with a smile, and said, “I want to watch
Monsters, Inc.,
please.”