Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Sometimes when we switch our attention, we might get really caught up in something, like the news. You read about some horrific event, and then you switch back to your project, and that event stays with you. Just like sometimes you can’t erase that whiteboard in real life completely — you see traces of what was written on it. Same thing happens in our minds, and that residue can interfere with our current task at hand.

KLEIN: This metaphor of the whiteboard and this idea that not all distractions are equal is one of the things in your book that has really stuck with me. It made me more attentive — no pun intended — to the way in which I try to replenish my attention or give it a break in ways that are pathological.

So, let’s say I’m preparing for an interview with a noted attention researcher, Gloria Mark. Then I flick over to my email, and it’ll be some terrible news about the world, or somebody mad at me, or somebody needs me to do something. And then I look over at my text messages and there’s one from my kids’ school about them needing flu shots. And then when I try to get back to reading your book, I’m still thinking about that.

So if you’re working on a difficult project, and you’re trying to focus, but you feel your attention flagging, what should you and what shouldn’t you do at that point?

MARK: If a person has the luxury to go outside and take a walk in nature, that’s the best break of all, because research shows that even just 20 minutes in nature can really replenish people. But a person can also contemplate or meditate. You can have a conversation with someone. Some people knit. Some people play simple mindless games. The great poet and writer Maya Angelou talked about her big mind and her little mind. And her big mind was what she used for her deep thought and her creativity. But she also did crossword puzzles or small tasks, which allowed her attentional resources to fill back up in the tank.

KLEIN: But if I play a puzzle game in the office, that would look like I’m goofing off at work. If I said I was going out to take a walk, nobody will stop me, but people might think it’s a little bit weird. It seems to me we’ve been taught that if we can’t be maximally productive for a period, what we want is to be minimally productive, as opposed to being nonproductive, to actually create a break. And that this is actually a little bit toxic. It means you’re never really recovering.

MARK: I think that you’ve nailed it. We’ve created a culture where to pull ourselves away signals that we’re not working. I think that managers and decision-makers need to be educated that it’s really important to give people permission to be able to take long breaks when they need them, to take walks outside, to have social interactions with other people, to create a culture where people are not penalized for not answering electronic communications after work hours and before work hours, to give people a chance to really detach from work, to restore themselves. Managers are delegating work to us without considering that people might be exhausted. And they need to understand that sometimes less can be more.’ (from the New York Times)