The 99 Percent | A Day Without Distraction: Lessons Learned From 12 Hours of Forced Focus
Here are the rules: All work must be done in blocks of at least 30 minutes. If I start editing a paper, for example, I have to spend at least 30 minutes editing. If I need to complete a small task, like handing in a form, I have to spend at least 30 minutes doing small tasks. Crucially, checking email and looking up information online count as small tasks. If I need to check my inbox or grab a quick stat from the web, I have to spend at least 30 minutes dedicated to similarly small diversions.
Sounds pretty ridiculous, right? I mean, obviously. I’m an hour and a half into my work day and posting on Tumblr. But, I found two things very interesting about this. The first, is how we are so easily distracted:
The motivation for my experiment should sound familiar. Over the past half-decade, researchers have been sounding the alarm on the dangers of multitasking. Gloria Mark, for example, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, found that the technology workers she studied would make it, on average, only 11 minutes into a project before being distracted. It then took 25 minutes to return to the task post-distraction.
The 12 Hours of Forced Focus is all well and good — it’s interesting, to say the very least — but what I found more interesting was one comment on the article left by Tumblrerer Philosophy For the Win:
Does this not follow the same logic as the baby example in Freakonomics (wherein the books on raising a child don’t necessarily make a good mother but the kind of mother who would buy such a book exemplifies a good mother)? In this case, it would not be that this system necessarily works, but that a person who was willing to be stricter with themselves could avoid the negative effects found in the multi-tasking study.
If you haven’t seen Freakonomics, you should. And the comparison is accurate.
