If the past 18 months threw off your balance, and external uncertainty left a low-grade anxiety lingering across your organization, maybe you should re-consider your collective work habits.
I’m reading Cal Newport’s A World Without Email concurrently with a virtual 8 -week mindfulness course. I highly recommend both to reconnect with how managing people requires managing yourself first. The course is with John Bruna who lives in Carbondale (mindfullifeprogram.org). I came to each serendipitously.
Bruna speaks of “becoming aware of being unaware.” In his course workbook, he cites a psychologist who notes that “most people are so distracted that they do not know what they are doing about half the time they are awake.” As a manager, that is truly frightening. As a person, it is increasingly obvious: there is too much stimulus coming at us. It stirs our mind into a frenzy. It blurs our attention. We cannot focus. We surf the input and our reaction to it all day long.
Sure, our modern forms of “work” have always conflicted with our personal lives. This is a deeper point, that how we live, and how we work are both diffracting our minds through a manic prism.
Email, it turns out, scatters our attention. The book and the course each take aim at counteracting a “hyperactive hive mind workflow.” Newport writes, “our brains were never designed to maintain parallel tracks of attention.” Our workflow and personal lives are now dominated by disjointed inputs that never cease. Newport suggests utilizing work tools that don’t have the equivalent of constant flashing pop-up ads and click-bait. He suggests insulating the mind. The constant shifting of contexts depletes our powers.
In a meditation practice, strengthening the habit of single-task focus is where a mindful meditation practice excels. The idea is to rewire and strengthen the mind. There are other ways to do this, immersive activity, exercise, great sleep habits, non-addictive habits, a nap. Mindfulness is a tool for deliberately re-setting one’s attention.
The benefit of fully focusing on completing one task and then another? Many organizations are acknowledging that it can mean better productivity, or in a reward to workers, less time at work. Whether the outcome is better productivity or improving mental (and physical) health, preserving “attention capital” is not just for cognitive workers these days. We just on-boarded an office manager recently. She was surprised when I suggested that I didn’t want her glued to her email, or the phone, or even her desk; that I’d rather have her focus fully on whatever task she has begun and to finish it. In a very Cal Newport moment, I said that she would not be judged for not responding immediately to an email, even if was from me, her boss. I don’t think she fully believed me. These need to be agreed upon at an organizational level, starting with leadership if they are to transform workers from hyper-monkey-mind shifters to confident producers.
Ping-ponging back and forth from an email about one project, from one extended conversation to another and another all day may FEEL like work. It is work, but is it the work you should be doing? Boy have I ended many days just accepting that I am spent –but the mindfulness practice is helping me understand how often operating for long periods in constant mode-shifting is not productive. It is attending to the grains of sand rather than the big-chunks of work that matter. In the words of John Bruna, am “becoming aware of being unaware.”
Mindfulness. Apologies if the word is beginning to sound to some like another overused word-resilience, shop worn by too many so that its meaning is being worn away to dust. For me, it is a rock. The course within a course is a 28-day meditation that slowly deepens and extends the length of mediation times, but I would recommend the most basic tool of the course to anyone. Three times a day, do a 21-breath count meditation to clear and reset the mind, followed by a reflection on what has been done skillfully and unskillfully during the intervening hours. Then set an intention for the next segment. Reflect. Repeat. That’s it. The reset can be as powerful as a short nap. A system reboot. Shut down the monkey mind. Then focus on a task, fully. Note how if you jump to email, carefully note if you are immediately scattered in a million directions.
I am no monk, but I am seeing more clearly that if the in-box jingles right then, it is a distraction that can wait. So much that demands immediate attention can wait if you are clear about what the “real work” is. Remember the beauty of email is that you DON’T have to answer it immediately like a phone. It is a tool for “low-friction communication at scale.” Our obsession with it has led to checking inboxes maniacally, on-average every four minutes, or on average 77-126 -times each day! Most of us now spend a third or more of our “work” day shuffling email, adding layers to a disjointed conversation. The various Newport cited studies are all probably undercounting this trend now.
Why do we check it constantly? (Email, or the unproductive ruminations in our mind?) Newport asserts, because having a question just sit there is making us anxious at some deep level that “members of the tribe are trying to get your attention and you are ignoring them.” There is a sense of social inadequacy.
So what is our typical response? Barrage those around us with more emails throughout the day and well into the evening. Prove that we are present, responsive and able to flit-about on important matters as rapidly as anyone else in the organization. So what. Managers, what do you do? Give your tribe permission to organize themselves differently. Organize yourself differently.
If you ever think your work methods are working you. You are probably right. Answering Email all day, for one, is not a job. Surfing the manic-mind flow is not a job either. Now that is something to meditate on.
