How Important Is Focus For Achieving Success?
that's like the difference of going
from a like a washing machine to a vacuum cleaner thereabouts in your
background
noise that has a enormous influence
on your cognitive
ability and your productivity like
like a 15% decrement in your because of sound
yeah volume s because because you
attend to it you attend I mean our that's how our brain like focus is a
challenge because this
is not the situation that we evolved
in right we evolved in a situation we're paying attention to novel stimuli is a
really good thing and sometimes it's
still a very good thing but it's at odds with a lot of
these modern things that we're
trying to do that are pretty new tasks for for people what about instrumental
music
because I tend to find that if I'm
listening to music that has lyrics in it then I find it quite distracting when
I'm trying to do some work
specifically writing work or reading work so when I'm researching guests for
the podcast like
I was today in my hotel room I had a
song playing it was a rap song and um it was I could I could feel my brain
subtly
jumping from the screen that I was
reading to the rap lyrics to the screen to the rap lyrics almost like just
oscillating between the two yeah and
I thought you got to turn that off cuz you you're not reading I turned it off
and I really made progress but I but I
sometimes when I write like books
and stuff like that I put instrumentals on and there's actually some apps in
the App Store now that are called like focus
music and they're lyric free music
and maybe like lot not lots of tonal changes or not very complex maybe
repeating I
mean I think that's going to be
better right the less novelty there is for you to attend to that's better but
think
it's also worth trying it with with
nothing and it depends how much you're pushing yourself right like a tiny an
improvement of motivation or your affect
or feeling good might be worth it if
you're not all the way at the edge pushing yourself right I don't know if
you've ever been on a there was
there was a time where I was trying to uh you
know do some foreign language
lessons uh that I was listening to while I would be running and if I started
hitting it hard
while I was running I couldn't even
remember what was said because it's you switch into being really focused right
and so I think it it depends if
you're pushing yourself all the way you need everything like there there are
times when I'm writing where I'm trying to
balance a lot of ideas in my head
and I almost feel like I'm overheating a little bit yeah and if I'm in that
phase
I I I want every Advantage I can
have um so push the distractions out but but
like there's also times to be to be
pleasant I think I think part of what's sensible is working in intervals
planning to work in intervals Focus
hard for a little while do the myangelo then switch to your your little mind
where
Is Music Hurting Your
Concentration?
you're we're doing something that's
sort of more fun and refreshing and maybe let you incubate for a few minutes
also take a shower take a walk you know what about
notifications uh because you know I
have a lot of notifications I try to turn them all off but they're still there
in
the background and um you was
talking before we got going about this sort of internal barometer of
distraction that
we all have yeah yeah this is so
this is another aspect of of Dr
Mark's Work where she found that we
have this kind of internal mechanism if you're getting distracted all the time
by notifications or whatever it is
and switching a lot if you say well now I really have to hunker down I'm going
to
get rid of the notifications or
whatever this stuff is you will start self- interrupting to
maintain the Cadence of interruptions
to which you have become accustomed right as if we have some internal like
distract ometer that is saying this
is your normal Cadence of interruption I'm going to continue it by popping into
your brain oh here's this thing I
need to check oh here's this person I didn't respond to you know you'll self-
interrupt that will go away but not
immediately so if you want to have a
lower Cadence of interruption you need to like build by
getting rid of those external
interruptions know that you're going to be self- interrupting for a while and
that'll go down more slowly so it has to
be more habit formation instead of
just today I shall be you know uninterruptible okay so just want to
make sure I'm clear on this so say
that I get a notification every M every I get 10 notifications a minute and
that's
what I'm used to right and then I
decide to turn my notifications off because I'm
used to 10 notifications per minute
you're saying that I will basically think of 10 things per minute to
interrupt myself with yeah for a
while because that's what I'm used to so we get comfortable with a certain
level of
interruption at a certain Cadence
and even if you we remove the thing that's interrupting us we'll just replace
it
with something else that interrupts
us that amount at that Cadence yes so you can see in studies where people are
taking cognitive tests if they have
their phone invisible even if it's off the people who are more phone dependent
or sort of more used to
interruptions they'll have a a bigger impairment on the test if the phone is
even like
visible or around them because
they'll yeah and so it's you know what thing did I forget to do and I think
something
that can help with this is keep a
pad nearby and when that thing pops into your head of the of what you forgot to
do or who you forgot to respond to
write it down so at least it's maybe that helps it not stick in your mind where
you're trying to hold it in working
memory like cognitively Outsource it so at least it's not sitting in there and
I
think that can help the adjustment
it makes me think a lot about people that struggle with sleep and just sleep
hygiene generally because if we're you
know if our phone is this thing of
interruption throughout the day then we go to bed cuddling our phone which a
lot of people do um it's probably going to
have quite a big impact on our
ability to sleep yeah I mean I wonder if you know I think there's some I think
our
phones are really useful for certain
things and I think they are disruptive for other things and I wonder if sleep
is one of the most important
because you don't really want to be
like leaving residue on your brain when you're trying to go to sleep so I would
put the phone as far away as
possible when you're really trying to sleep and not at the last minute either
personally
which you do oh I leave it in a
different uh floor and airplane mode have you always done that no when
did you start doing that well I
definitely do it when I'm in the process of writing a book because then all
these
things that I take for granted I'm
like now I really got to lock in and and be better um
and I have a I have a five-year-old
son and I was more of a night person who
would work at night like I would do
a lot of my writing in the wi hours and he's getting up early no matter what
and
so I realized that I had to start
being a lot more efficient about some of my schedule and started thinking a lot
more
about having it be dark having it be
quiet having it be cool not having the phone around um the last thing I'm
reading not being work rated
otherwise I'll be thinking about that and it'll take me longer to go to sleep
so I think
I became a lot better about it when
I when I had my son when my son came around it's funny you mentioned that
you've got a son because much of your work made me
think about what I'll do when I'm a
parent someday because you talk about how these early years where if a child
focuses on being a specialist in
something particular or a generalist they have worldly different outcomes and
I think as a big football fan and a
big Manchester United fan I've always thought when my kid comes out of my wife
someday the first thing I'm going to get him doing from the age of two months old is kicking a football around because then he'll be a Manchester United player I'll get to go to the games I'll be in the players box everything will be great but your work seems to suggest that
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