To become really good at something, you need to practise. But how can you focus when there are so many distractions?

Would you like to become highly knowledgeable about an important social issue? Pick a problem that interests you, such as homelessness, suicide or genocide. Set aside an hour or two every day to read about it. Find the most authoritative sources. Find a mentor to be your guide. Write about what you’re learning. Get involved in an action group. In a year or two, you will be highly informed. Keep at it and you’ll become one of the most knowledgeable in the country.

                  If you need credentials, you might want to get  a research degree. But that’s more for credibility and status.

                  How do I know this? This advice is based on research about “expert performance,” which is performance that can be measured fairly objectively, like in sports. Anders Ericsson, the world’s leading researcher in the field, started off studying students in a Berlin violin academy. Those who were judged by their teachers to be best had practised much longer over their lifetimes. From this and other studies, Ericsson concluded that the key to expert performance is lots of practice, and not just any sort of practice, but a particular sort, called “deliberate practice.” It means pushing yourself at the edge of your ability, under the guidance of an experienced teacher.

                  Let’s say you’re a teacher. Doing years of teaching in the classroom doesn’t count as deliberate practice. What you need to do is repeatedly practise actions that are especially challenging, whether it is presenting a concept or dealing with a student. Yet few teachers, after their initial training, spend time practising their skills. Instead, they just use them: they teach using the skills they have already acquired.

                  The same applies to typing. If you spend hours texting friends, it doesn’t count as deliberate practice. But if you drill yourself, for example by sending the same message over and over, trying to improve your speed or accuracy, that’s how you can improve.

                  The same thing applies to every sort of skill. In some fields, such as therapy, finance and doctors in general practice, the criteria for expert performance are not so clear-cut. Still, the basic approach is the same.

Anders Ericsson

                  The work of Ericsson and other expert-performance researchers has been popularised in books such as David Shenk’s The Genius in All of Us, Matthew Syed’s Bounce, Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated, and Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code. As well, Ericsson and co-author Robert Pool wrote Peak, an engaging treatment of the research. Ericsson’s provocative claim is that, with some exceptions, there’s no such thing as natural talent. No one starts off with special aptitude for sports, music or nuclear physics. Some people are more intelligent, in the sense that they can learn faster, but after thousands of hours of practice, this initial advantage becomes less important, as different mental processes take over. More important than intelligence is the capacity to persist in practising over time, which is often driven by interest and goals.

                  This research has been around for years, but to me it’s surprising how little attention is paid to it. In my classes, I used to tell students that they could become really good at a chosen area, something that interested them, but I could tell they were sceptical. It’s an unusual person who sets out to practise skills in an occupational area where doing this is not standard. In sports and classical music, coaches and teachers know what it takes. In other areas, traditional approaches persist.

Focus

A key to deliberate practice is focus, namely committing full attention to the task at hand. Doing something while your mind is wandering won’t help you much to get better. You need to concentrate on what you’re doing.

                  Most people, when they learn to ride a bicycle or drive a car, are focused on the task. On a bicycle, you need to focus, otherwise you might fall over; driving a car, you might crash. However, once you’re good enough to ride or drive, the need to strive declines. It’s easier just to rely on your acquired ability and not push yourself. Only if you seek something more, like racing, is greater focus needed.

                  The difference in focus may help to explain why some performers do better than others who practise just as much.

                  In our high-output writing programme, we help each other to try to write nearly every day, overcoming the common habit of procrastination and bingeing. What gets in the way of daily writing? Distractions. Social media is a potent distraction. Many of us report that it’s a disaster to check Facebook or email first thing in the morning, because before long the day is well advanced and the window of opportunity to focus on writing is lost. For most, it’s far more effective to write first thing, and to eliminate distractions. Turn off notifications, put your phone in another room, close the door, close open books, do everything so it’s just you and a screen or piece of paper.

                  Another distraction is your own thoughts, including a little voice in your head that says it would be so much better to wait until tomorrow, or that what you’re writing is crap and you’ll never get published. In some ways it doesn’t matter too much what the voice is saying, because it’s distracting you from the task at hand, taking up mental space you need for best performance. It’s better to be in something like a meditative state, switching off or pushing away intruding thoughts, so you can focus on what you’re writing, or whatever else you might be doing.

                  One thing I’ve learned from years of coordinating the writing group is that only some people are able to follow the programme. You might think it would be attractive, given the research backing it up and the testimonials of participants. One explanation is that habits of procrastination and bingeing are deeply entrenched. Another factor: there is no accountability for undertaking daily writing. Yet another: most academics resist seeking help to improve their writing and teaching. They think they need to do it on their own, without assistance, and without practising and without expert guidance. In a sense, scholarly writing is like athletics a century ago, when athletes would train when they felt like it, before coaches began insisting on daily training, carefully supervised. Then there’s AI, yet another discouragement from working hard to become a better writer.

Dealing with distractions

There’s another problem: distraction merchants have become more sophisticated. For instance, social media algorithms are designed by clever psychologists to hook users. Many authors have delved into this problem and written about behavioural addictions (see below for some books). Many of these studies focus on the problem itself. The challenge: how do we break the habit?

                  With this background, I saw a book titled The Attention Recovery Plan. It addresses this very issue. When your attention is being hijacked, you do need a plan, and that’s exactly what the author, David Gillespie, provides. The book is a self-help guide to breaking behavioural addictions and achieving focus, in order to be successful. It is simply written and practical. It is filled with action plans on how to regain focus. It also has a simple, useful account of how the brain is captured by behavioural addictions.

                  Everything Gillespie says seems plausible to me. Whether his approach is effective is hard to know, because he doesn’t cite any studies about testing it. It’s more an inspirational guide than a tested programme.

                  Gillespie has chapters on each of five “weapons of mass distraction”: social media, gambling, gaming, dating and pornography. For each one, Gillespie describes the challenge and then offers a toolkit of rules for breaking free. These are pretty much the same. For example, when it comes to social media, you need to detox by getting off of all of them. Not easy! But at least it’s a plan. But maybe you need to use social media for work or social connections. Gillespie understands. He says, after detoxing, have a plan when you rejoin, for example turning off notifications, keeping your phone in another room except for designated times, and putting strict limits on your use. Again, not easy!

                  When I sit on the bus and observe the passengers, most are on their phones. Seldom do I see anyone reading a book, like me. How likely are any of them to read Gillespie’s The Attention Recovery Plan? Would they even have the attention span needed to read chapters from his book, and how would they have the incentive and willpower to follow his advice, no matter how good it might be?

                  Gillespie has more to say. He advises developing mindfulness (meditation is one form), getting plenty of exercise and sleep, and having a support network. All good advice for doing just about anything. For most people, having a support network is crucial, because breaking an addiction on your own is so difficult. That’s true of chemical dependency: without the environmental cues of cigarettes and familiar smoking routines, it’s easier to kick the habit, and likewise for alcohol and other drugs. But this isn’t going to be easy with behavioural addictions, which seem to have conquered swathes of the population, especially young people.

                  It’s useful to remember that, decades ago, up to half of adults smoked, including in offices, cinemas and aeroplanes. It took decades of campaigning and media attention for smoking to be stigmatised and banned in many places, thereby making it easier to break the habit. Perhaps this will be true of social media, with the advent of phone-free zones. Just don’t expect the companies benefiting from behavioural addictions to back away from their attempts to control your attention.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

For valuable comments, thanks to Paula Arvela, Marina Granato, Olga Kuchinskaya and Lynne Li.

See also

Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention (my commentary)

Some choice quotes from The Attention Recovery Plan

 “We have created an environment that damages our brain’s ability to focus, and now we are mass-medicating the symptoms.” (p. 20)

“Superfocus is the hard work.” (p. 23)

“Chronic stress degrades your dopamine system, which in turn makes your brain crave more intense rewards.” (p. 41)

“These platforms may be marketed as benign digital town squares, but they are in fact meticulously engineered psychological traps, designed by behavioural engineers to capture and hold your attention for as long as possible.” (p. 51)

Tristan Harris “recognised that the goal of the attention economy, to maximise time on screen, is fundamentally hostile to human flourishing. The endless notifications, the variable rewards, the algorithm-driven outrage are core features of a machine built to mine human attention for profit.” (p. 56)

David Gillespie

“In the attention economy, two classes of people are emerging: those who have learned to defend their focus, and those whose attention is the product being sold.” (p. 61)

“These [dating] platforms are meticulously engineered to hijack your most powerful cognitive state — focus. They turn the search for connection into a gamified loop of swipes and unpredictable rewards. They create a paradox of choice that leads to paralysis and dissatisfaction, and use an algorithm’s gaze to trap you in a feedback loop, limiting your options while creating the illusion of infinite possibility. The entire system is designed to transform you from a person seeking a partner into a user generating engagements.” (p. 106)