Changing and tracking behaviours Part 2: About Focus

This is part of a series I'm writing inspired by a behaviour-modification course I've been taking online, called "Sluta Skjuta Upp" (= Stop procrastinating). My writing is not affiliated with the course itself, I'm using these blog posts to channel what I've learned into something I can revisit later.  

One of the myths of modern office work is that multitasking is a good thing.
My course leaders have tried to make us see the other 'evil' side of this, judging by the articles, videos and lectures they make us read, watch and listen to. There are some downsides to working too many parallel tasks, particularly the following:

• It decreases our efficiency, so even if may of us do several things at once and thereby seem productive, we use more time mentally switching between them than actually working on them
• It perpetuates behaviours where it is difficult to truly prioritze the most important thing to do (since you're already working on it, but alongside 5 others), so you end up making feeble progress
• It involves so much start-up-time that very little time is spent 'close to the finish line' - several of the articles we read on the matter presented research showing that for every distraction to a work task, it takes roughly 20-30 minutes to return to that task. (I can only imagine that those articles measured this clinically, because empirically it must be hard to tell whether any of the multiple open windows on our desktops is "the" task to return to, when they all need doing...)

Most of us participating seem to agree that focusing on one single thing at a time is a dwindling skill among many of us - we have so much to do that we are becoming experts at taking the path of least resistance on a 5-minute basis, and most of us agree that that road leads to online procrastination (more on that in a future post about motivation and rewards...).

As a way out of this,  many of the little exercises we have been challenged with are geared at chunking off undisturbed time slots to do our work tasks in, in a focused a way as possible. This goes for taking breaks too, we have a recurring 'challenge' to register a dedicated 5-minute break every day where we do something intentionally restorative (instead of continuing to check email or sneak in more splintered work efforts into something). This can include feeding our social media addictions, as long as we limit them and are intentional about taking the time for it.
There's a bunch of timer-based ways of doing this, the famous Pomodoro technique is really the iconic mother of them but my version has been to use a Tabata timer app to chunk work into 30-minute segments followed by rests ("recovery", as it were). For a struggling distracted mind, whatever works is good enough ;) The trick, I've found, is to signal clearly to the surrounding world that you need to remain undisturbed during that time - because making your co-workers commit to not reaching you at that moment, means you need to honour the commitment of making use of that time.

I have to say that getting these little everyday prompts has been super effective. This would never have sunk in as well if this had been a once-a-week thing that you could ignore until the last minute.

So so far, the 'little bit every day' is beginning to prove effective in the fight against postponing progress. :) It seems to mainly be a question of changing my attitude and re-evaluating the worth of small steps, rather than giant (panic-fuelled) leaps forwards. I'd say that paying money for that insight feels worth it for me so far - because if left to my own devices, I'm sure I'd just postpone that lesson too ;)

To be continued!