Finally, I’m sitting down to write this article. I think I’ll update my Facebook status with that. Wait, the phone is ringing. It’s Mom. My cousin’s wedding in Montreal was beautiful. Uncle Henry . . . Hold on, I have another call coming in. Why does everyone want to clean my carpets? OK, I’m back. So the wedding was good? Oh right, Uncle Henry . . . Look at that, my friend Jillian is IM’ing me. On phone talk soon xo. I need to pay my insurance bill today. Yikes, an email from my editor! Mom, I have to go. Now what was I going to write?
Even the most minimally plugged-in American would find it hard to remember a time when multitasking wasn’t a euphemism for productivity and a day was not dominated by distractions. Whether they come packaged in 140-character tweets, e-mails, or a UPS delivery hardly matters. Juggling simultaneous demands in this 24/7 culture is at turns obligatory, frustrating, and oddly seductive.
Not to mention impossible, inefficient, and destructive, says Winifred Gallagher, author of the new book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life (The Penguin Press). “Multitasking is a myth,” she says. “You are just switching rapidly back and forth between tasks, which makes you more error prone and actually takes longer than if you just attended to the tasks one by one.” And every time you interrupt your work to watch another YouTube video, “it takes up to 20 minutes to reboot your brain. You lose all kinds of nuance.”
But focus carries a bigger payoff than just producing better work, Gallagher explains. The quality of your life—including health, happiness, and a sense of personal and spiritual fulfillment—centers on what you choose to pay attention to. That seems pretty clear when you consider the deliberation we allow for decisions like what job to take or whom to marry. But even less obvious choices ultimately shape the person you are. “The easiest way to improve virtually every aspect of your life is to choose your focus carefully,” says Gallagher. Whether that means choosing to read a book or watch TV, concentrate on the positive or dwell in the negative, check the Blackberry or stay present in the dinner conversation, “careful focus is the sine qua non of the conscious life. The question is, are you going to choose your focus or are you going to let someone or something else choose it for you?”
Finding Focus
The genesis for Rapt came after Gallagher was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer. Almost immediately, she realized that her cancer was angling to monopolize all of her attention. “Like a lot of people, I thought that if something really bad happened to you, you had no choice but to focus on it,” says the Manhattan-based mother of five. “I was supposed to think cancer, cancer, cancer all the time.” But Gallagher intentionally decided to buck that trend. She broke the situation down into two stages. First, she focused on solving the problem. She entrusted the healing of her body to a top-notch medical team and signed on for multiple rounds of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. Then, she focused on her life without cancer—the book contract she had to fulfill, her family, and her yoga practice. Eight months later, she began to recover.
Gallagher’s initial impetus may have been to maximize the joy for however long she had left in this life. But science shows that focused attention actually heals. Studies have shown that mindful meditation (read: conscious focus) has helped heal chronic pain, anxiety, depression, cardiovascular disease, eating disorders and immune dysfunction. In a 1998 study at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center by the renowned meditation expert Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, psoriasis patients who underwent ultraviolet phototherapy while meditating healed faster than those who had only UV treatments.
“I think a lot of people see life as dependent on luck,” Gallagher says. “If you luck out, not many bad things happen to you and lots of good things do and you can be happy. But if it doesn’t work out that way, you can’t. I just found out that wasn’t true.”
Man Versus the Machine
Ask whether it’s rude to check your phone during a dinner party and the majority of civilized society will say yes. They may even throw in a disgusted eye roll for good measure. And yet, chances are those same folks have been guilty of a quick text during intermission or answering an incoming call while waiting for the valet. That’s because when we say it’s rude, we actually mean it’s rude when someone else does it to us. When we jot off that quick e-mail before the dessert course, it’s necessary.
“We assume because we have cell phones that it’s normal to carry them
everywhere and answer them no matter where you are,” says Gallagher, who owns a Blackberry, laptop, cell phone and landline. “There’s no question the machines are here to stay, and if anything, they’ll probably only get more interesting. We have to figure out our relationship with them. We don’t work for the machines; the machines work for us.”
The incessant desire to check and tweet and upload smacks at technology addiction—a compulsion for novelty and self-importance no longer satiated by focusing on one conversation or attending to one task at a time. “People know it’s not good but they can’t stop because it’s stimulating,” Gallagher explains. Far more stimulating than standing in line at the post office or writing that year-end report for your boss. Of course, there are social implications to our knee-jerk need to respond to every beep and blinking light. “We are becoming a society that believes we should always be trading up for a potentially better or more profitable interaction. But you’re just constantly flitting from one thing to another, and you’re not going to write War and Peace like that.”
Six Steps to Re-focus
Every choice you make to stay focused can lead to a more satisfying life—or at least a less frantic workday. “Attention is like athletic ability; we all have some,” says Gallagher. “How much we end up with depends on how much we develop it.” Try these tips to bring more focus into your life.
- If you have important work to do, turn off your machines for 90 minutes and concentrate on your work. Then take a break—your attention will start to wander about then anyway—and answer emails and return phone calls.
- Limit how often you respond to the influx of information. Return phone calls every hour, not every minute. Disable the email notification on your computer and adhere to set times for checking your inbox.
- Whether you’re trying to figure out what you want to do with the next hour or the rest of your life, set priorities. “You’re not going to get an email that tells you what to do. It’s not going to come in on a Twitter,” Gallagher says. “You have to decide where to put your focus.”
- Leave the iPhone behind sometimes. Unless a family member is in intensive care, you can be unreachable for the hour it takes to have lunch with a colleague. Interactions with other living beings should trump machines.
- Accept that you can only do one thing at a time, because that’s how your brain works. Do the most important thing on your list first and then move calmly to the next thing.
- Take up meditation. Research shows most people who do some form of intentional practice, like meditation or yoga, aren’t aiming for nirvana. They do it to learn how to focus on what they need to do in daily life.
Rachel Dowd is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and active Facebook poster.
