Clawing Back Attention
Do you sit down at your desk with a clear idea of what task you are about to tackle? Do you then sit at your desk, head down, and 90 minutes later have 90 minutes of work done on this task?
During the last 6 months of my PhD I found ways to focus properly for long periods of time and as such finished slightly earlier than the average Computer Science PhD student.
After finishing I’d become so used to focussing that I figured it had become second nature to me. Not so.
After taking on various projects I found myself with three work e-mail accounts, a personal account and Skype vying for my attention every day. I discovered that just like everyone else, if my e-mail notifier is lit up telling me I’ve got mail I have to check it.
What if the sites are down? Maybe it’s an interesting opportunity? I’ll think of a reason for seeing what’s come in and nine times out of ten it isn’t important. Thanks to Notify deleting this unimportant e-mail takes seconds so doesn’t waste much time. Or does it?
15 seconds from start to finish: e-mail comes in, notifier lights up, I click once to see what it is and again to delete it. On the surface it looks like I only lost 15 seconds but in reality I lost much more than that because it broke my focus on the task at hand. What’s worse is I may have decided to respond to the e-mail which would take even more time.
So on the one hand it’s only 15 seconds, but they just keep coming in all day, breaking my focus. The cost mounts up quickly. If I just waited until a specific time of day to go through all the mail, going through each would take the same amount of time but wouldn’t cost me my focus. I could even leave e-mail until the late afternoon and give it my worst time (in terms of productivity) rather than my best time (the morning).
While writing my PhD thesis I started to get up at 6am every day as I found that it gave me several hours of space to focus before any e-mails might come in. I also regularly quit my mail notifier and otherwise protected this time in the morning from interruption. The result was probably the most productive period of my working career thus far, writing the thesis and even pursuing some new theoretical research in the process.
Last week I caught myself fighting the urge to check what e-mail had just come in and had to laugh. If the notifier wasn’t running then I wouldn’t think about e-mail for a second, so why have it running at all? I experimented with setting the notifier to check only once per hour (it was set to a shocking 30 times per hour) and have seen a modest improvement.
However, that’s still four e-mail accounts being checked every hour; which means it is then virtually impossible for me to focus for 90 minutes on anything.
My PhD supervisor Richard Neville gave me the answer to this problem some years ago but it’s only now that I’m taking it up: pick one time during the day when you check your e-mail and ignore it the rest of the time. That’s how he protected his research time and for my sanity that’s how I’m going to protect mine.
The attention-sapping power of e-mail is a bit of a hydra however, as you may still need to deal with:
- People expecting you to be readily available by e-mail many/all hours of the day.
- Dealing with junk e-mail.
- E-mail that you want to receive but don’t want to be notified about.
