Train Your Brain to Focus

Like many people, Becca has trouble concentrating on one task at a time, with emails, chats, and social media distracting her from her work. But, she's determined to get focused. For a week, she commits to a regimented focus routine recommended by concentration aficionado Cal Newport to see if she can train her brain to stay on track. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh man, it's already noon. I gotta get going on

(00:05):
my story. Hello, blank page, All right, I can do this.
Here we go typing a sentence. This is hard. I
wonder what's happening on Twitter. I'll just click over for
a quick minute breaking news. Everything is horrible. No, your horror.

(00:31):
This is a distraction. Distraction gate stop. Here's a photo
of a panda. Oh god, it's three thirty. Why do
I ever read Twitter? I feel like garbage. I really
need to get to work. Okay, writing some words, this

(00:54):
isn't so bad. Oh a chat message? I want a gossip.
You know you want to gossip. I don't know. I
heard the salacious thing about this person we talk about
all the time. Let's dissect it together for the next
twenty five minutes. It's gonna be juicy and fun. And
we'll also talk about work a little bit, so you
can justify spending your time chatting with me. Okay, that

(01:19):
was fun. That comes is work? Right. While I'm here,
I might as well click over to my team's group chat.
We're working on a big project. I bet there are
important updates for me in there, dancing. I feel like

(01:40):
I'm forgetting something, something important. Oh god, my story and
it's almost four I just need to focus. I'm so
bad at concentrating on one task, even when I know
it needs to get done as soon as possible. But
I'm gonna get serious now. I'm gonna sit down and write.

(02:01):
But I wonder what's happening on Facebook. Welcome to Works
for Me, the show where we try to fix our
workplace problems to find out what strategies will work for you.

(02:22):
I'm Francesco Levi and I'm Rebecca Greenfield. This week, it's
Beca's turn to take us on a productivity journey. Becca,
what is the problem you're trying to solve this week?
As you heard in that dramatic reenactment at the top
of the show, I cannot focus on my work. I
get distracted by Twitter or the Internet or my email

(02:44):
or chat very easily. And it feels like I can
never sit down and complete a task without an interruption.
How is that possible? I know that you can. You're
capable of getting things done. You get things done all
the time. In fact, I think you're like a particularly
productive person. Like I know people who can't focus, and

(03:04):
you're nowhere on that list. Okay, yeah, that is, this
is what people say to me. So when I told Danny,
my boyfriend, that I wanted to work on my focus
for our next experiment, he had the exact same reaction
as you did. But as I explained to him, getting
things done is different than being focused on the things
you're doing. I don't really understand why you think you

(03:28):
need to focus better, because you are way more efficient
than anyone I know. You'll be like, all I did
was chat all day and then I wrote these four stories.
I'm like, what, I've never written four stars in one day.
And also, I don't think we can play this from

(03:49):
my employer because I'm not g chatting all day. You're not.
You are working while chatting me. Okay, well, I would
like to not have that habit. I would like to
work really focused and then when I'm done, reward myself

(04:09):
with a G chat and then be the best version
of myself. Okay, So you're not liking the experience you're
having while you're getting stuff done. I do not like
the experience, and this is a common problem that I
guess you have. Also, um, I'm far from the only
person who can't focus. British Telecom found that people check
their phones every twelve minutes, so yeah, this is something

(04:33):
a lot of people can relate to. Yeah, I definitely.
I mean, my phone just flashed. There's like a new
feature where it shows you how much screen time, and
my just was like an unwelcome push notification about my
screen time. And I was shocked and horrified at just
like the amount of time staring at my phone, because
I know I'm not most of the time, I'm not
working when I'm staring at my phone. So I've done

(04:55):
on a phone. Yeah, okay, so your focus is a
problem apparently, and you wanted to fix it. How so
I didn't really know how. I looked some stuff up online,
and there are all of these brain training websites, but
they didn't really get at what I wanted. Like, I
didn't want to get better brain games. I wanted to
get better at focusing on my work. So I went

(05:18):
out and found a super concentrator, the simone Biles of Concentrating.
If you will, it's not unusual for me to do.
I can do a five six hour, seven hour day
where I'm just working on one thing. That's Cal Newport.
He's a computer scientist at Georgetown university. He also happens
to be very good at concentrating. He even wrote a

(05:38):
book about it. It's called Deep Work Rules for Focused
Success in a Distracted World. Cal got interested in concentrating
when he started looking into how people do their jobs.
He quickly realized that the answer to that was not
very well. He found that the workplace is a very
distracting place, and people like us have convinced ourselves that

(05:59):
engaging in the distractions like answering emails and slack messages
is part of our jobs. But he says, it's just not.
I don't think we're properly valuing uh, concentration, because it's
easy to say, you know what, I'm busy, I'm communicating,
a lot of messages are moving, I'm on messenger, I'm
on my phone, I'm active a lot. So I must

(06:20):
be productive. I must be doing something something right. I
must be producing value. But I think when you look
a little bit closer, you realize actually it's the undistracted,
concentrated work that is more valuable to the bottom line
in many different positions, in many different fields. Kel on
the other hand, doesn't operate like this at all. In
his work life. He gets all of his work done

(06:42):
during the hours of nine to five. He doesn't use
social media, he ignores his inbox. He's disciplined, so he
realized that he had a lot to teach sad distracted
sacks like me. The good news is that, according to
cal most people don't even know how much they can
really focus because as they're not even trying well. I

(07:02):
think physical fitness is a good analogy for thinking about this.
A lot of people incorrectly think about the ability to
focus as something like a habit, like flossing their teeth,
something they know how to do. It's just a matter
of doing it more often. That's not actually the case.
If you're not actually training your mind to be good
at sustained concentration, you're actually not going to get nearly

(07:23):
as much value out of your concentration sessions. So this
is not about small tweaks around the edges. Really embracing
focus as a core skill in your job and something
that you practice and protect can have massive changes to
the amount of things you're able to produce in the
quality level of those things. Cow says that you have
to work out the concentration muscles in your brain, and

(07:44):
by working them out you'll get better at using them.
So everyone's trying to multitask because they feel obligated to.
But multitasking is the destruction of your work, and you
really need to concentrate. And apparently concentrating is something that
you have to use it or lose it, right, Yeah,

(08:05):
I find this very encouraging. Well, so what are you
going to do to improve your concentration? I Am going
to work out my brain in an attempt to learn
how to concentrate better. Cal told me about this interval

(08:29):
training exercise where you sit down with a timer and
do twenty minutes of work focusing on a single difficult task.
If I can get through twenty minutes a few times
without distraction, I can increase the time by ten minutes.
And if I get through that, increase it another ten minutes,
and so on. Cal also talked about how it helps
to have a ritual before you start doing focused work,

(08:50):
like he always takes a walk to get coffee before
getting down to work. So I'm going to walk around
the news room and put on music without words to
get in the zone. I'll do all of this for
a week. Like this, you have like a little workout
plan from your personal trainer, except it's for your brain,
not your body muscles. But how will you know if
you have succeeded. So I am not very confident in

(09:15):
my focus ability really at all. Like twenty minutes of
doing one thing uninterrupted sounds completely impossible to me. Like
when I'm writing a story, I cannot not click over
to something or some other tab, Like I'm writing one
sentence and I need to distract myself. So I think

(09:35):
I'm going to suck at this. But that said, I
want to be able to do thirty minutes of uninterrupted
focused time by the end of my experiment. I'm starting

(09:58):
off the experiment by doing the ritual, which is walking
around the newsroom once before I get started. So that's
what I'm doing. Look, I'm like a crazy person talking
to this microphone. This was me on my first day,
completing my first ritual lap around the office. Okay, back
at my desk, going to find my playlist. I found.

(10:24):
I found this playlist called Concentrate at work on Spotify.
Going to set a timer or queue up a timer
twenty minutes and I have a story that I'm working on.
I'm gonna work on that and ready set good the

(10:46):
playlist had a lot of technobis. I sat down to
work on my story and it wasn't as hard as
I thought it would be. I was trying really hard
to not look at distracting things, and it was working.
But soon enough I realized that I wasn't exactly concentrating

(11:06):
on my work either. I have five minutes left. I
think I'm basically sitting here staring at the page and
not concentrating thinking about other things. I'm gonna call this
I fail. Well, this gets into like a a tricky area, right,

(11:27):
because you thought you'd have to just eliminate your distractions,
but then you find ways to distract yourself with your
own mind, even if you're not actually like looking at
Twitter or doing whatever else would take you away from
being in your word document. Yeah, my brain was distracting
itself fine enough on its own. Did not need the
two meets. But I did decide to try it again

(11:47):
that day. Okay, take two. Gotta in my ritual again.
So I did my ritual again and walked around the
news room. Then I sat down to do my work,
and again my brain was fighting the concentration. I was
reading a story and my eyes were jumping all over
the page, just looking for something else to do. But

(12:08):
if that weren't bad enough, then something out of my
control happened. Becca if Ellen was a woman, yeah, is
that the subjects lite? What if he was O? Great technicallymatically,
but it's a subject time, so I think stuff. Okay. So,

(12:33):
as you saw, I got interrupted by my boss asking
me a question. That's I can't X out her window.
She just talked to me. Okay, that's over. Timer is up. Okay,
I'm done with this experiment right now. Too much to do. Well,
there's a wrench that got thrown into your plan. Yeah,
you we work in an open office, like not every

(12:55):
interruption is a self imposed interruption like the internet. It's
I'm also, this was your boss talking to you, right,
so it was hardly somebody you could ignore or just
be like, excuse me, I'm concentrating right now doing an
experiment for a podcast to improve myself. Yeah. No, I
couldn't do that. And cal had warned me about the
stuff about my brain fighting it, but he didn't really

(13:17):
warn me about the realities of working in a modern
open office and how that could interfere with my experience.
So I tried one more time on that first day,
and I failed yet again. Fifty seconds left and I
clicked away man. So that not a very successful first

(13:42):
day of focusing. Huh. No, my first day was a bust.
It sucked. I failed like hard every single time, and
I was really feeling bad, really bad about myself. But
I had to keep going with the experiment. So on
day two I soldiered on and after the break, we'll

(14:03):
see how I did. After my day of failures, on
day two, I decided that the playlist was the reason
for my failed first day. I really hated the music.
I am just really not into techno. It felt like

(14:26):
being inside and urban outfitters or a Burning Man themed
co working space. It was not for me. I don't
alienate our techno loving listeners. Sorry, it's just awesome for me.
But I found something I liked better called chill lo
fi steady beats. I don't have to play for you,
but I can if you want, I can imagine what

(14:47):
it sounds like. I'll ever every one second. That's how
a creepy Okay, well that's that sounds like haunted music
box in the haunted house. But whatever works for you,

(15:09):
sleepy wow, right, well, to me, it's neither sleepy nor creepy.
I like it. And with this new playlist in hand,
I did my walk around the newsroom ritual again. Can
I just point out that, like, it's kind of funny
that every single time you decide you're going to get

(15:30):
ready to focus in a given day, you now have
to get up and walk around. It's so much walk.
I guess you're getting your steps in, that's right. So
I walked around the newsroom again, and then I settled
into another focus session. Need to close tab? Wasn't my email?

(15:53):
Was that? Twitter? Minimized chat, setting my timer, and here
we go. That day, I was working on preparing for
a big interview I had coming up. I was researching
the people I was interviewing and then writing a list
of questions to ask them. It was feeling pretty good,
and then before I knew it, time was up. I

(16:15):
did it. I successfully focus for twenty minutes straight, no interruptions. Wait,
already on your second day? Yeah that's awesome, considering you
felt like you could never achieve focusing for more than
one sentence of writing at a time. Yeah, it was.
If I dare say, I'm miraculous, I felt I felt great,

(16:36):
and so I thought maybe the playlist was the problem.
But then came my next try and I failed. So wait,
the playlist wasn't the problem. No, I mean I think
it helped. I think you have to make your environment
as optimal as you possibly can, Like I can't escape
from our open office, but at least I don't have
to torture my ears with techno music. But after control

(17:00):
for that, I realized that the culprit the reason I
was still struggling was the type of work I was doing.
So cal talked about two kinds of work. There's deep
work and there's shallow work. Shallow work has to happen
in order for just an organization to function, but deep
work has to happen if you actually want to advance
your organization or advance your career. Shallow work is necessary.

(17:21):
Deep work pays to bills. Shallow work is the stuff
we have to do to function in the workplace, like
checking emails, attending meanings, making lists. And deep work is
the meat of your job, which in my world is
reporting and writing. And the deeper the work, the harder
it is to focus on. Yeah, deep and shallow is
a really apt analogy for that because I look at

(17:42):
like the shallow work, the stuff that you can take
off your list, and it's just basically easy, but it
makes you happy when you actually get around to getting
it done, like that feels so good, But it's not.
It's not hard. So if you just set aside the
time for it and commit to doing it, you can
do it. But the deep work, it is like staring
into an abyss, Like you're just like, I have to

(18:03):
make something out of nothing. I have to write a story,
or I have to write a script for a podcast.
I just got shells. It's it's so hard to just
stare into the abyss and it's just the ugly depths.
But I also think that there's the spectrum of work
in between, stuff that contributes to deep work, but isn't
actually that deep. It's like deep adjacent. So for me,

(18:24):
that's researching and writing up questions for an interview, right,
you actually have to think about that, right, it's not
like writing an email. But it's not like writing a
story either, And that's why I think I got through
that focus session because it was this medium work adjacent
that's right, So it's not as hard as writing a story.
So I zoomed right through it. But so the deep work.

(18:45):
Does CAL have any suggestions for how to get through
the deep work? Yes, but it's not a satisfying answer.
It's not just change your playlist, he said. I had
to keep practicing. So I just kept trying and failing
and trying and failing again. But then eventually, on day four,
sorry if you did it, I got through twenty minutes

(19:10):
and it wasn't a fluke. I'd broken through some wall
and kept succeeding, and by day five I was comfortably
getting through twenty minutes. So I decided to go for
the holy grail thirty minutes. I've been training for this
moment all week. I get up from my desk to
walk around the room to get in the optimal mindset.

(19:32):
After a brisk clock I'm feeling good. I sit down,
put in my earbuds and switch on chillow by study beats.
My brain feels primed. I set my timer and then
I get to work on a story. I'm in the zone,
writing complete sentences about taking a break. I think about
checking Twitter, but I tell myself, no, stay strong, and

(19:55):
before I know it, okay, I didn't the thirty minutes.
It was torture and they did it. There you're okay,
and I can procrastinate throw Wow, wow, thirty minutes the
holy grill, you hit your gold, I know. And it

(20:18):
really felt amazing. And I feel so freaking good, like
it's just doing thirty minutes of writing where you just
get through it, you focus. I feel like a queen.
I know. I know this sounds like I'm over exaggerating,

(20:40):
but it really felt good. I mean, usually it's so
hard for me to get stuff done, like three pm
on any day, and wow, this is crazy. I feel
so good, Like my brain felt different, I swear, and
from then on I was untouchable. I did thirty minute

(21:02):
blocks of focus work for the rest of the week,
no problem. I was getting so good at thirty minutes
that on my last day, day seven, I decided to
try for forty minutes. WHOA, we didn't. Honestly, it was hard, um,

(21:23):
but I kind of what done. Finished one task, started another. Honestly,
feel like I could do more time. Oh from zero
a zero congratulations, Becca, thank you you really triumphed. Yeah,

(21:49):
it felt amazing, as not to restate the point, but
it felt amazing. It feels amazing. I had been worried
that it would be harder for me to get through
the time when I had hard work like writing to do,
But it wasn't. I not only wrote my story, but
I liked it. It got addictive. I wanted more and more.
Cal are focus afficionado predicted that that would happen if

(22:13):
you do this pretty aggressively for a week. By the
end of the week, you'll feel you know, this is
not only a little bit easier, but my work feels
a little bit different. I feel like I'm achieving a
new level of concentration on producing sharper words or more
words per minute or whatever the metric is, but that
I'm better at concentrating than I was. The other feeling
you should be looking for is also the sort of
an emergent attraction to concentration is something that you start

(22:36):
to crave more. So many parallels with exercise, right like you,
It takes discipline, you have to work out your muscles,
and then when you do it, you feel really good,
and then you get kind of predicted to it. I'm curious,
do you think your work were sharper like did the
writing you did during those concentrated times actually turn out better.
So it's very hard to measure this, but it was
during a time of intense productivity for me. It was

(22:58):
like a crazy couple of weeks I had there. Also,
the story I wrote one of those times was a
story that this does not happen often. But my editor
was like, oh, this is really good, and so I
don't know, you know, you can't really measure it, but yes,
I guess. Well, it definitely sounds like you succeeded at

(23:31):
your experiment, right, you sailed past that thirty minute goal. Yeah,
I did. I did it. After my week long experiment.
I was an enthusiastic focus supporter. I am so into
this and I hope I can keep doing it. It
feels so good to just sit down and do work.
And I also was really scared that when I got

(23:53):
to writing stories, because writing it's so hard and torturous,
and you want to just like write a sentence, look
at Twitter, write a sentence, check your email. That that
would be so hard. But when I was doing the
concentrating thing, it just wasn't it. Just I think you
psych yourself out, but you can sit down and write
a story and yeah, it's not perfect, but you can
do it, So that was awesome. The downsides I think

(24:17):
are when you come back, you feel like you can
just go crazy not focusing. Yeah, I wonder if if
you don't keep this up, it goes back to being
just as hard. If the exercise analogy holds, then it would, right. Yeah,
I read somewhere about exercise like if you don't do
it for two days, you're back to your base. So

(24:37):
maybe it's the same for brain, Like I can't I
got to go back to twenty minutes and not being
able to do it. But you're addicted to it at
this point, so it shouldn't be a problem. Let's just
keep doing these sessions focusing forever um. But yeah, I
think there are a couple of caveats, Like I said
you do, there's like still a lot of procrastination evolved,
like those does not have anything to be procrastinate, and

(25:00):
like it took me a long time sometimes to get
to the focus session. And I think you in a
way procrastinate more before and after because you are anticipating
all of your focus. You're like, I gotta get into
my internet time now like a crazy person. And then
I also think like not everyone can do this if
you have a type of job where you can't shut
the world out for chunks of time at the day.

(25:21):
But I think a lot of people think their job
is like that, but it's not. They think that they
can't shut the world up if they can, like I
think a lot of people can take twenty minutes and
not answer emails. Yeah, and presumably if your job really
is one of those jobs that you can't shut out
the world, like like you're an air traffic controller, then

(25:43):
don't do that. By not shutting out the world, you're
actually doing your job, So you would still feel accomplished
even if you're just like listening to all the inputs
and you know, taking in lots of outside feedback, because
that's still good work. Like you never would need to
check Twitter. You might need to respond to an but
you're right, probably not as quickly as you think. So
I really strongly suggest people try this. UM. And the

(26:07):
big lesson that I'm taking from this is I thought
of myself as somebody who thrived in the chaos, like
I'd optimized working with distractions, and now I know that
they're I don't have to do that, Like there's a
better way, and it not only helps me get work done,
but it really made me feel a lot better. It's like,
I don't want to say there's a simple trick that
will turn you into some superhuman worker, but sometimes you

(26:31):
just have to like try something different and you'll feel
less stuck. Um. Next time on Works for Me, Francesca
takes on the dreaded team meeting. Oh, did anyone have

(26:53):
any general announcements? Um ered. Thanks for listening to another
episode of Works for Me. If you like this show,
please go over to Apple Podcasts and take a second
to rate review, and of course subscribe to our show
and tell your friends, Tell all your friends or your

(27:13):
best friend at least. You can also find all of
our shows and are very cool illustrations on Bloomberg dot
com slash quirks for Me. Are there any problems in
your work life that you're dying to fix? We would
love to hear about them. Call us and leave us
a voicemail at two one to six one seven zero

(27:34):
and we might use it on the air, Or you
can tweet at us I'm at Francesca today and I'm
at RZ Greenfield. This show was hosted and recorded by
me Becca Greenfield and me Francesca Leavie. This show was
produced by Tobrah Foreheads. Jordan's Spear did the illustrations on
our show page, and we want to give us special
things to Ebban Noby Williams, Liz Smith and Erica Parpinello.

(27:57):
Francesca Leavy is Bloomberg's head of Hot. How see you
next week. Bye,