Do Not Break the Immersion

Concentration has an entry cost.

Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke observed office work and experimentally interrupted participants with messages. After an interruption people often returned to the task faster, but worked under more strain, sped up and reported more stress. Outwardly productivity could recover; the internal price did not show up in an ordinary report.

So protecting concentration is not a cult of slow work. It is a refusal to keep paying for context recovery with a raised pulse.

Before starting hard work you have to rebuild the context: recall the goal, open the materials, work out where you stopped, hold several connected elements in mind. After every message, call or quick look at the news, part of that context is lost.

The distraction itself may take a minute. Getting back takes much longer.

Hence it is worth working in finished stretches. You do not have to complete the whole project. It is enough to reach a natural boundary:

• solve one block;
• finish a section;
• check a calculation;
• process one group of data;
• prepare a state that is easy to continue from.

Before such a stretch it is worth removing the predictable interference:

• switch off unnecessary notifications;
• close unneeded tabs;
• prepare the materials;
• tell the people around you when they can come to you;
• write down a stray thought without switching to it.

Full isolation does not suit every kind of work. A doctor, a dispatcher or the head of an emergency crew cannot declare a four-hour deep-focus regime. But even in reactive work you can protect particular intervals for tasks that require connected thinking.

The main problem is not the phone as an object. The problem is the mind’s readiness to leave a hard task at the first legitimate excuse. The phone simply operates in this field as a highly qualified supplier of excuses.

It shows clearly during a reconciliation. A person is holding three open files, two sums that do not match and a hypothesis about where the difference came from. A message arrives: “could you take a look when you have a minute.” The minute takes forty seconds. The hypothesis takes nothing — it is simply gone, and the next twelve minutes go on getting back to the place where it appeared.

Hence an unpleasant consequence for people who take pride in being available. Someone who answers everything immediately is paying for other people’s convenience with his own most expensive resource, and doing it silently, because such spending does not appear in any report. From outside all you can see is that he is always reachable and somehow never gets anything done.