The Virtue of Focus, an Old Fashioned Strategy for Learning and Creativity
by Steve Beisner -- January 23, 2010
An essay in which the author, an unabashed cheerleader for technology and especially computer culture, nevertheless argues for the utility of non-multitasked interaction of writers with their environment.
According to the article in the December 15th 2009 Scientific American by Naomi Kenner and Russell Poldrack, multitasking results in shallower engagement with its (multiple) subjects, even in people that are good at it.
From the Scientific American article, "It seems that chronic media-multitaskers are more susceptible to distractions. In contrast, people who do not usually engage in media-multitasking showed a greater ability to focus on important information."
For Writers, the issue of focus is a practical one. Staying focused, staying in "the zone," as many term that mental state of creativity and productivity, is often critical to doing one's best work.
Multitasking is, by definition, a splitting of one's attention. It is the opposite of focus. Computer scientists distinguish between two kinds of multitasking: the truly concurrent kind in which the computer actually performs more than one activity at the same time and the kind in which the computer rapidly switches it's attention between tasks, working on one at a time. Humans can, in some cases, do both kinds. (To my fellow geeks... OK, I'm simplifying, slightly.)
Research shows that even "benign" multitasking like listening to music while performing some other activity is a distraction from the intensity of focus that one might otherwise achieve. (But it does seems reasonable that music might be a more preferable distraction than something more diverting, like conversation or construction noise, that the music might mask.)
Last Fall at Tulane University I had the pleasure of hearing Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, speak to a class of incoming Freshmen students. After a brief introduction Diaz dedicated most of his time to answering questions from the audience. One student said how much he enjoyed the author's talk, but wondered why the professor who taught his Freshman English class was so boring, and why his assignments were laden with such old and boring books.
I did not record the author's response word for word, but it was something like, "Not everything worth knowing is easy to learn, and sometimes the struggle against boredom and difficulty is necessary and perhaps even, itself, reason enough to persist. Be grateful you have a professor that values real education."
I wanted to stand up and cheer.
Focus can be hard to achieve even for those who are good at it. Focus can be helped along by innate interest in the subject, by small (!) amounts of caffeine, THC, etc., by mediation or relaxation, by practice and force of will, and probably millions of other techniques people have discovered.
You may notice that after a day of surfing the web, an example of serialized multitasking, that it is much harder to read a difficult passage in a textbook or challenging novel or follow a complex argument in an essay. One's mind tends to bounce along the surface like a flat stone skipping over a smooth pond.
Focus is an intellectual bench press. It is exercise.
Multitasking is a useful talent. It has it's place and for certain kinds of problems may be the most effective strategy, but both creative and rational activities require intellectual muscle: that is what focus provides.
Woody Allen said, "Eighty percent of success is showing up." To that I'll add Beisner's conjecture: "Ninety-five percent of success is paying attention after you show up."