Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

by Jocelyn K. Glei

In a world filled with distraction, attention is our competitive advantage. Look at each day as a challenge—and an opportunity—to keep your eye on the prize.

We’re asked to apply our intellectual capital to solve hard problems—a creative goal that requires uninterrupted focus. At the same time, we’re asked to be constantly available by e-mail and messenger and in meetings—an administrative goal that creates constant distraction. We’re being asked, in other words, to simultaneously resist and embrace distraction to advance in our careers—a troubling paradox.

It’s hard, however, for someone higher up to make such a demand without clear evidence of exactly how much the behavior is costing the organization. Because of this lack of clear metrics, we’ve sunk into a productivity morass, where the focus in adopting a new administrative practice is on short-term convenience rather than long-term value.

Now that we better understand how we ended up in our current productivity paradox, we’re left to consider solutions. In the long run, we can hope to reform our administrative practices, keeping only what maximizes our ability to do meaningful work. But we shouldn’t expect such a major transformation to happen anytime soon. We are left then to consider individual habits that will preserve our ability to apply undistracted focus to valuable problems while still making us available enough that we do not annoy our coworkers.

This is a problem I’ve studied and written about for years. I’ve seen many different proposals for how to preserve focused work in a hectic schedule. Of these many proposed tactics, one stands out, in my experience, as being unusually effective. I call this the focus block method, and it works, ironically, by turning the machinery of the distraction culture against itself.

THE POWER OF DAILY FOCUS BLOCKS The focus block method leverages the well-understood concept of a pre-scheduled appointment. It has you block off a substantial chunk of time, most days of the week, for applying sustained focus to your most important creative tasks.

This scheduling usually happens at the beginning of a new week or at the end of the previous week.

The key twist is that you mark this time on your calendar like any other meeting. This is especially important if your organiz...

Blocking off time for uninterrupted focus, however, is only half the battle. The other half is resisting distraction.

Start with small blocks of focused time and then gradually work yourself up to longer durations.

Tackle a clearly identified and isolated task.

Consider using a different location for these blocks.

The battle between focus and distraction is a serious problem—both to the competitiveness of our companies and to our own sanity. The amount of value lost to unchecked use of convenient but distracting work habits is staggering. The focus block method described above does not fix this problem, but it does give you a way to push back against its worst excesses, systematically producing important creative work even when your environment seems designed to thwart this goal.

Creative minds are highly susceptible to distraction, and our newfound connectivity poses a powerful temptation for all of us to drift off focus.

THE MULTITASKING MYTH Studies show that the human mind can only truly multitask when it comes to highly automatic behaviors like walking. For activities that require conscious attention, there is really no such thing as multitasking, only task switching—the process of flicking the mind back and forth between different demands. It can feel as though we’re super-efficiently doing two or more things at once. But in fact we’re just doing one thing, then another, then back again, with significantly less skill and accuracy than if we had simply focused on one job at a time.

BACKGROUND DISTRACTIONS Of course, double-tasking isn’t our only affliction. Perhaps even more insidious is our habit of superficially committing to focused work while leaving e-mail or social media sites open in the background. All it takes is a whistle from one of these apps offering the thrill of an unexpected communication, and bam, we’re off course.

THE HANGOVER EFFECT No matter how much we think we’re in control, our brains have their own agenda. Let’s say you’re working on a writing project in the morning and—for the sake of variety—you decide to leave it unfinished and work on a creative brief in the afternoon. This may seem like a harmless change of pace, but research has shown that the unfinished morning task could linger in your mind like a mental itch, adversely affecting your performance later on—an effect that psychologists call “attentional residue”.

While it feels easy enough to put one task on hold to start another, studies like this are a reminder that we find it very difficult to let go of unfinished challenges. They continue to draw on our mental resources even after we think we’ve switched focus. What’s more, attempting to ignore this mental tug drains us even further. If you can, it’s best to find a good stopping point on a project—one that frees your mind from nagging questions—before moving on to another task. That way, you’ll find it easier to achieve mental closure and apply all your energy to the next challenge.

Of course, there are times in the creative process when it does pay to switch things up. When you’re at the problem-solving stage or you need to generate new ideas, psychologists have shown that taking your mind off-task briefly can help your subconscious find links between disparate concepts.

But this is an exception to the general rule that multitasking is a productivity drag masquerading as an efficiency booster. Once you’ve cooked up your ideas and identified the way forward, it’s time for the real labor of love. For that, you need single-minded focus.

First, people have a really bad habit of coming in and checking e-mail first thing in the morning. And for many people, the morning is the most productive time. E-mail is very, very tempting, so they basically sacrifice their productive time for e-mail.

The second issue is that in doing things, we like to feel that we’re making progress. So if you get to erase ten e-mails from your inbox, you feel like you have achieved something. But if you think carefully about it, it’s not clear that you’re going to get something out of it.

The next thing working against us is the calendar. It has a tendency to represent tasks that can fit in thirty-minute or one-hour blocks. And tasks that take, say, fifty hours—which could be how long it takes you to complete a meaningful...

Every time you’re doing something, you’re not doing something else. But you don’t really see what it is that you’re giving up. Especially when it comes to, let’s say, e-mail versus doing something that takes fifty hours. It is very easy for you to see the e-mail. It is not that easy for you to see the thing that takes fifty hours.

I think that e-mail and social networks are a great example of random reinforcement. Usually, when we pull the lever to check our e-mail, it’s not that interesting. But, from time to time, it’s exciting. And that excitement, which happens at random intervals, keeps us coming back to check our e-mail all the time.

Another thing to understand is the notion of choice architecture, which means that the environment in which we make decisions tends to have a lot to do with what our final decisions are. So if you’re in line at the buffet, the way the food is organized—whether the fresh fruit and salad is easily accessible or tucked in the back behind more tempting options—will determine what you end up eating.

It would probably be best if managers went to the IT department and asked that e-mail not be distributed between eight and eleven every morning. The idea that the best way to communicate with people is 24/7 is not really an idea about maximizing productivity.

Self-control has two elements. There are self-control problems and self-control solutions. Self-control problems are all about “now versus later.”

Self-control solutions are all the things we try in order to get ourselves to behave better. We think that if we pay a lot of money to join the gym, we will feel guilty and we will keep going. It turns out that guilt does work—but only short-term. Eventually, the guilt goes away. We buy hundred-calorie cookie packs. Because we think that if it’s just a small pack, we will eat fewer cookies, and so on.

Then finally, there is ego depletion, which deals with what happens throughout the day as we resist temptation over and over. The results show that it takes energy to resist each temptation, and that as we use more and more of this energy as the day goes on, we have less and less of it left, which increases the chances that we will give in to temptation.

I think one of the biggest factors is progression markers.

If you’re working with a pen, you have evidence of all the things you’ve done. You can see your path. But if you work on a computer, it’s just the current state of the work—you don’t have the previous versions.

If that’s the case, you could think about some tricks to remind yourself about your progress. Maybe we should keep a diary? Maybe we should keep older versions of our efforts? Maybe every day we make a new version of a document we are working on so that we can keep a visible record of our progress?

Negative distractions that interfere with creative work can come in many forms: the television set, undone chores, social media, e-mail, coworkers who want to gossip, anxieties, self-doubt. Removing oneself from all of this interference is theoretically possible

There are many ways to use positive distraction techniques for more than just resisting marshmallows. Set a timer and race the clock to complete a task.

Write down every invading and negatively distracting thought and schedule a ten-minute review session later in the day to focus on these anxieties and lay them to rest.

Baumeister suggests many strategies for increasing self-control. One of these strategies is to develop a seemingly unrelated habit, such as improving your posture or saying “yes” instead of “yeah” or flossing your teeth every night before bed. This can strengthen your willpower in other areas of your life. Additionally, once the new habit is ingrained and can be completed without much effort or thought, that energy can then be turned to other activities requiring more self-control. Tasks done on autopilot don’t use up our stockpile of energy like tasks that have to be consciously completed.

Entertaining activities, such as playing strategic games that require concentration and have rules that change as the game advances, or listening to audio books that require attention to follow along with the plot, can also be used to increase attention.

Even simple behaviors like regularly getting a good night’s sleep are shown to improv...

As much as we cultivate it, however, self-control is still finite—so we must combine this approach with other strategies.

Shifting from mindful to mindless work gives the brain time to process complex problems in a relaxed state and also restores the energy necessary for the next round of mindful work.9

Every person has a different length of time he or she can work before productivity and efficiency begin to decline—and this length of time can also shift over the course of a day.

Keeping track of when energy levels rise and fall will help determine a schedule for alternating between m...

Once these ebbs and flows are determined, a timer can be used to keep track of, and direct, these shifts to help pre...

I would argue that taking time to experience the flip side of connected, intentional activity—to disengage from the stream and truly be present in the now—is crucial to the well-being and performance of creative minds. Consider it “filling the well,” as poet and artist Julia Cameron once put it. When we turn off one type of stimuli, we unleash another.

RENEW YOUR INTEREST IN YOURSELF

My brain suddenly reactivated. I became truly aware of my surroundings: The quiet of an early April snowfall. The grandeur of century-old trees. The hours flew past.

What I learned during my solo experience was that my thinking—my creativity and imagination—reached a new velocity as soon as I unplugged. When you tune in to the moment, you begin to recognize the world around you and the true potential of your own mind.

PRESERVE UNSTRUCTURED TIME

As Bezos explained in a WIRED profile, “I wander around and talk to people or set up my own meetings—ones that are not part of the regular calendar.”11 Setting aside this unstructured time to fully invest in inhabiting the present moment—to take the tenor of his team or fully dive into his own thoughts—has no doubt served Bezos well in honing Amazon’s long-term vision.