How I focus deeply every day
Did you know that it takes seven minutes to concentrate on tasks? If we add an average of 150 mobile unlocks per day, imagine how much time we have left each day to focus on what matters.
That gap between tasks is what researcher S. Leroy calls “attention residual” in Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work. She told you about it in a bit more detail in Why we need deep focus to success according to science.
When we go from working on a PowerPoint to answering a WhatsApp message, it will take at least seven minutes, plus the time to answer messages, to go back to work on the presentation that we wanted to finish before lunchtime.
Could you receive 50 messages a day by WhatsApp and email, together? Seems like a reasonable average to me. Well, the calculation says that you would spend almost six hours trying to regain focus between tasks. I have not added the resolution time of the messages, so I could spend a whole day reacting to questions and requests.
I am telling you this because surely you lack time to finish tasks and projects during the day. I had the same problem too, but I found some solutions in the book Deep work. Do you know what? They work.
