I used to be highly productive. By the time I ate breakfast each morning, I had clocked several hours of undivided focus only broken by an hour at the gym. With the pandemic, productivity has not come as easily. Mornings this summer were characterized by sleeping in and bouncing between Messenger and YouTube tabs. After years of avoiding much of anything that divided my attention, I suddenly found it hard to say no to a lunch break that became an hour of TV, or filling an evening with video games.

I claim no uniqueness in this respect - to take one data point, video game sales shot up 63% early in quarantine, mirroring my sudden interest. Conversations with friends across the country revealed a similar pattern of the monotony of work-from-home resulting in difficulty maintaining old routines.

I started reading again, and in particular, read Deep Work. Professor Cal Newport wrote this book in 2016 to argue that focused work is both becoming increasingly rare and increasingly valuable in today's economy. Exploring his ideas have helped me to regain much of my productivity, and below I share the points that I find most compelling and relevant to avoiding distraction amid the pandemic.

Don't multitask. The core of deep work is dedicating chunks of time where you focus your attention on a single task. Key to understanding this sequential rather than parallel approach is the concept of attention residue. When switching from Task A to Task B, a residue of your attention remains with the original task. After learning about this idea, I've observed it in my own work when multitasking. If I quickly switch to my text messages while waiting for code to compile, that conversation occupies headspace and distracts the next hour of work. When you're working, just work on the task at hand. You'll be amazed by your mind's ability when it isn't stuck thinking about the previous thing.

Stamp out distraction. In order to avoid multitasking, you need to eliminate the possibility of distraction. During deep work blocks, I take a draconian approach to removing anything that is not the task at hand. My phone is silenced and out of sight. Apps on my laptop for email, instant messaging, and social media are closed, with no notifications enabled. This greatly increases the barrier to distraction. When I hit a wall in my work, perhaps an unforeseen design problem or an elusive bug, my first instinct is to reach for the escape of a text or email. Putting those distractions out of reach allows you to sit with your challenge, and use your undivided attention to solve it.

Consider your tools critically. The any-benefit approach to tool selection means using a tool if it offers any benefit. For example, this could offer a defense of social media, which can maintain ties to people not in your immediate network. Newport encourages the use of the craftsman approach, wherein a tool is used if its positive impact significantly outweighs its negatives with respect to the core factors that determine your success and happiness. He combines this with the law of the vital few, the idea that 80% of a given effect comes from just 20% of the possible causes. Together, these ideas encourage the rejection of tools that do not have a significant net positive impact on your success and happiness, as they fall outside the vital few that will have the vast majority of the desired effect. For me, this has meant deleting most social media. Especially during COVID, I found myself turning to my feeds often, but a critical analysis revealed that they were not core to progressing my goals.

Rest with discipline. COVID has made it more difficult to focus on work, but also to get the rest you need to excel the next day. With the office and living space only paces apart, the barrier to working distractedly into the evening is greatly lowered. Newport explains the importance of resting with intention in two interesting ways. Unconscious thought theory argues that the unconscious mind is instrumental in solving large, ambiguous problems. You may have experienced this when having your largest breakthroughs in the shower rather than at your desk. Time away from work gives your mind space to work through challenges in an unstructured way. Attention restoration theory posits that rest is essential to enhancing your focus the next time that you sit down for deep work. Taking the same workday discipline to having hours of uninterrupted, deliberate rest in the evenings and weekend will best position your mind to perform later on.

By choosing sequential focus over distracted multi-tasking, and approaching your tool selection and rest with discipline, you can retake control of your productivity during this pandemic. If these topics are of interest to you, I recommend you read Deep Work. Newport concludes his book with a quote: "I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is." A bold assertion, but personally, I've found the monotony of quarantine to be most manageable when punctuated with deep work.

Enjoy this post? Share your email and I’ll let you know when the next one is ready!