Maintaining focus – Gathering ideas
In this chapter you will learn:
● how to insulate yourself from intrusive notifications that threaten to fragment your concentration;
● simple strategies for improving your focus;
● how to create an effective retrieval system to catch more of your own ideas and insights, using a manual or electronic system.
In contrast to many other forms of intellectual activity, academic study demands a deeper level of thinking and uninterrupted concentration for long periods. It can take you two hours or more of close concentration to develop a deep grasp of the ideas that are being developed in a closely argued journal article, before you then read it through again to take out the structure and then critically evaluate it. This is undisturbed deep thought. You know that to understand it and all the implications of the arguments the author develops you need to block the world out so that there is only you and your thoughts in your mental space, nothing else.
A more distracted world
So we need to create clear mental space free from all distractions. Of course, there have always been distractions that break our concentration and we have all found ways of blocking the world out. But today we live in a more distracted world of insistent notifications that constantly threaten to fragment our concentration. The mere sound of a ping, the sudden appearance of a pop-up or a glowing red dot telling us there is breaking news, emails or messages on WhatsApp, Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook are enough to break our concentration.
According to recent research conducted at Duke University, the average person gets between 65 and 80 notifications a day and it takes close to 25 minutes and serious mental effort to regain your momentum and the level of concentration you need.1 All of these notifications are designed to grab our attention, satisfying our dopamine addiction to new things that makes phone checking so compulsive. As one writer put it, ‘we have spiralled into notifications hell’.2 We have been conditioned to respond, despite the serious intellectual costs this carries.
Insulating ourselves
10So we have to insulate ourselves. Otherwise each interruption might fragment our understanding, obscuring our ideas and robbing them of the clarity we need to use and develop them effectively. For good ideas to come through we need to clear a space for them; good ideas only come to a mind that is already prepared to receive them. There must be no irrelevant preoccupations prowling around, hijacking the mind. There is no room for serious thought in a cluttered and distracted mind. The thoughts may be there, full of insight and vision, but we can so easily pass them by without even knowing that they were there at all.
When those, like Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and John Nash, who have made the great breakthroughs in our understanding, have been asked how they go about their work, they describe how they clear their mental desks and concentrate obsessively on just the one problem, thinking about nothing else.
Example
Andrew Wiles
In 1995 when Andrew Wiles explained how he produced the proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem, which had stood for 358 years unproven, despite the work of countless mathematicians, he said there had to be ‘a long period of tremendous focus on the problem without any distraction. You have to really think about nothing but that problem – just concentrate on it.’3
Example
Sarah Gilbert and the Oxford-AstraZeneca team
Creating a new vaccine to protect us against the coronavirus demanded the same level of focus and concentration free of all distractions. On Saturday 11 January 2020 scientists in China made the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus publicly available online, in particular the 3,819 letters that coded for the spike protein. Within 48 hours the Oxford scientists had worked out the exact genetic sequence to make the vaccine. Even experienced researchers, like Sarah Gilbert, surprise themselves with what they can achieve if they can insulate themselves from all distractions and concentrate on a problem. As she said in her Dimbleby Lecture, ‘what we discovered, was what we can do when we understand our goal, and really put our minds to achieving it’.4
What can you do?
To insulate yourself from this plethora of distractions, the simplest answer is to set aside a time, preferably after you’ve finished work for the day, to check your phone. If you have to check it in the morning, give yourself no more than an hour. After that, turn it off and make sure you are free of all distractions. After you have finished, check it again, if you need to, but limit the time; dictate to the technology, don’t let the technology rule you.
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Maintaining focus – Gathering ideas 63
