The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

by Justin Whitmel Earley

But when we embrace our reality of being able to be present only in one place, we find the deep joy of being present someplace.

The smartphone is a tool that enables many things, but it will never multiply our presence.

Attention is our precious commodity. Our life is defined by what we pay attention to. This means our life is defined by which of the many cries for our attention we heed. If we’re going to take that call seriously, we have to acknowledge that our phones are carefully designed to attract our attention and sell it to advertisers.

Studies show that having your phone on silent or in the room is far different from having it off or out of sight.

because if we turn our phones off, that means we cut off the possibility of our presence from others. We can’t reach or be reached. This is exactly what is scary, and it’s exactly why we should be turning our phones off every day as a habit. The goal is to regularly cut off the ability to be reached by everyone and anyone, so that in those limits we can be fully present to someone.

But whether the boys and I are riding bikes to the park, initiating a royal rumble on the living room floor, or setting the table together, my presence is fundamentally different that hour of the day. I am with them. Whatever we’re doing, it is together.

So when I’m with them, I am actually with them. They have my gaze, which is to say they have my attention, which is to say they have my love.

Giving someone our attention is giving them our love

I also don’t turn it off when I’m away from my wife (unless she knows about it).

There’s a huge difference in presence between mumbling an “mm-hmm” and checking my phone while someone is talking, and saying, “Excuse me, I need to let my wife know what time I’ll be back.”

Our habit is to tell them what we’re doing and why it’s important that they wait until we’ve finished. “Are you finished with that important work email yet?” is a question I hear from my sons often. But it isn’t because I’m always on my phone; it’s only because when I am, I tell them exactly why. If I’m not willing to tell someone why I’m asking them to wait, usually it’s because there isn’t a good reason to ask them to.

I knew that to follow through on that promise meant not only saying no to other requests that morning but also protecting my brain from distractions.

Within an hour, I felt the intense pleasure that can come only from doing focused work on one important task—often referred to now as deep work or flow.

Almost always, however, it’s a cover-up. It wasn’t the morning that was crazy; it was me that was crazy. I made it crazy due to my inability to be present to work with focused attention.

In the age of smartphones, the ability to resist distraction purposefully is not just becoming the single most important career skill, it’s also a matter of whether or not we love our neighbors through our work.

the question of neighbor love is this: Am I too distracted to actually serve my neighbor?

There’s no love of neighbor outside of attention to neighbor.

“How can we love our neighbor if we never allow her to reveal herself because we are always chattering?”3

We can’t use it the right way without habits that protect us from the wrong way. When we do nothing, they tilt us toward absence.