health and fitness: Too busy to focus? Try this

vendredi 29 janvier 2016

Too busy to focus? Try this

Few people need convincing that intense focus is a good thing, constantly threatened by email and social media. The real challenge is achieving it

Early in Cal Newport’s new book, Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success In A Distracted World, he meets an architect who dreams of “deep work chambers” – heavily soundproofed boxes, each the size of a small room, permitting “total focus and uninterrupted workflow”. I want one. Alternatively, I’d settle for Mark Twain’s arrangement: a writing shed on a farm, so far from the main house that his family summoned him to meals using a horn. These days, few people need convincing that intense focus is a good thing, constantly threatened by email and social media. The real challenge for anyone writing a book on the matter, lies in answering the plaintive follow-up: “Yes, but how?” You don’t need to hear again about Bill Gates’s regular “think weeks”, spent in rural isolation with only books for company. You want to know how to find time for thinking given your job, your toddlers, your boss, and your baffling yet stubborn failure to achieve Gates’s £55bn net worth.

The first part of Newport’s answer is a financial incentive. Deep work is no “nostalgic affectation” of writers and philosophers, he insists; it’s essential if you’re to master the kind of work that will remain lucrative once robots are doing the rest. Today’s rewards, he notes, don’t go to those who use Facebook, but those who build its code, a task demanding long stretches of focused thought. (Our best brains now make their millions using their focus to damage everyone else’s.) So it’s an error to think you’re too busy with office chores or parenting for deep work. It’s deep work that will let you keep that job and feed those kids.