Distractions Are Not Your Enemy: How To Make Distractions Work For You
No one likes distractions… until they bring you your next big idea
You don’t have enough distractions in your life.
A recent study from Columbia Business School showed that when people were tasked with solving two problems, people who switched between the two problems were three times more likely to solve both compared to people who worked on them sequentially.
This evidence runs contrary to the common belief that more focus leads to better ideas. Distractions can actually be good for your work because jumping to different ideas can lead to more innovative thinking and increased creative output.
It's not as simple as more distractions=better work. If that were the case, I would be watching TV and replying to texts while writing this article. I’m not, I have purposely limited distractions.
That's because distractions can lead to better work, but to find the value in distractions you have to know what to do with them.
The most distractable time in history
We have never been more distractable at any point in human history. Access to an unlimited supply of information and connections sits in our pockets. It's just too irresistible.
According to a recent study, the average American checks their phone 205 times a day, or almost once every five minutes while awake. That is a lot of distractions.
Now I am not saying if you check your phone 305 times a day you will magically start generating new ideas. There will always be value in setting aside focused time, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore all distractions.
You see, these are the main issues with distractions:
There are too many.
We follow distractions at the wrong time.
We don’t capture the information we come across while distracted.
So let's dive into those and explore how to handle each one so that the next time you get distracted you know what to do.
Problem 1: There are too many distractions
Ping, Woosh, Buzz.
The all-too-familiar sounds of Slack messages, emails, and texts pulling our focus away from the task at hand.
These sounds come into our awareness dozens of times a day. It takes a lot of mental energy to focus on the new item and then refocus back to what we were working on. So just because distractions can be good does not mean we shouldn’t try to limit them.
Like many things in life, distractions are good only in moderation, so taking a break and scrolling through social media can be fine if you are thoughtful about how long that break will be.
Or letting messages and calls from certain people come through is fine because they may be urgent and worth shifting our attention to.
Did I really need to see that now?
Anytime a notification pops up and distracts us it gives us a chance to think about if we really needed to see that right then and there. It may be an opportunity to turn off notifications for that app or find a way to limit alerts during certain times of day.
When we limit distractions then a lot of the noise goes away so we can focus on what is important. We then have room for useful distractions to come through.
Limiting distractions is great, but they may still come up naturally as we read an article or come across an interesting idea in our work. In those cases, we need to know the right time to follow those distractions.
Problem 2: We follow distractions at the wrong time
Ever sit down to start researching for a new project and then before you know it you are four links deep reading about something completely unrelated? I’ve been there and in those cases, I rarely get done what I set out to do.
Now that doesn’t mean to not let your curiosity guide you when doing research. In fact, you should let your mind get a little distracted by the link in an article and explore what is out there. That’s how you can make new connections and repackage information in useful ways.
This is the process of divergence, of expanding the number of ideas available to you for a project. It's the research phase. This is when we let our distractions run wild. Follow the link, search your inbox for that one slightly related newsletter, and google that thing that just popped into your head.
Distractions are powerful during the process of divergence because they allow us to gather information from unlikely sources, to make connections that may not have been there otherwise. That’s when the distractions start to work for you.
But all things must come to an end and you have to transition to convergence.
Convergence is the point when you have enough information to begin action, you limit distractions and begin to create with what you have in front of you. At this point you don’t keep following distractions to expand your knowledge, you zoom in and block out the noise.
This brings us to the third way to make the most of distractions. But it all weighs on an important condition.
Problem 3: We miss out on capturing interesting information
If you are going to follow distractions, you need to have a way to capture and organize the information you come across. This is the field of personal knowledge management (PKM) and is a field with many established resources. Tiago Forte is a key thought leader in the space and I encourage you to check out his website for more on PKM.
The whole idea of knowledge management is that there is so much information out there, but we rarely come across it at a time when it will be useful to us. So by organizing it in an easily retrievable way, we can save and then use information when we need it most.
How can I make sure I see this information at the right time?
If you are working on a project and come across information that is interesting but not relevant to you at the moment, save it somewhere you can come back to it. You never know when it might be pertinent and then you can pull it up when it will be useful.
With a capture system in place, distractions can be great because they can lead you to gather a ton of new information. You can build up a database of articles, quotes, images, books, and videos that you can use for other projects.
Again, what started as a distraction is now something useful, working for you.
So next time you get distracted, recognize it and do one of the three things mentioned above to make that distraction work for you.
1.) Limit it so that you don’t get the extra noisy distraction again.
2.) Run with it and see what connections you can make.
3.) Capture and organize it in a way you can come back to at a more opportune time.
We are distracted hundreds of times a day so imagine the difference it could make if even half of those moments, you used as an opportunity to add value to your life.
The effects would be powerful!
We just explored how distractions can be powerful tools in our work, but next week I’ll share the dark side of distractions.
I will show you how to identify when distractions are negatively impacting your work, and how you can ruthlessly eliminate them from your life.
I’ll even share a story about how I went from being distracted 20 times an hour to making deep work a regular part of my routine.