Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Dark Side of the Obsession With Focus

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

The 'New York Times' bestselling author and contrarian self-help writer Oliver Burkeman joins the show to talk about his new audio essay series on work, focus, and interruptions—and how, too often, our emphasis on eliminating distractions ironically takes us away from the most important things in life. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Oliver Burkeman Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up everybody? It's Austin Rivers from Offguard, and I've got some exciting news. Offguard hosted by me and my guide Pasha Gigi is officially moving to our own podcast feed. We are now dropping two shows every week. Me and Pasha go way back and talk so much hoops already that we figured it was time to fire up the mics and let you in on these conversations. Every week, Pasha and myself will hit on the biggest stories happening around the league. Tap into the show twice a week on our new Offguard feed on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. business with Shopify and bathe records of of the ventas with the form of

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Hello, everyone. Happy New Year again from plain English. Before we get started on this week's episode, I just want to say, in the spirit of gratitude, how lucky I feel

to have this show, which is now entering our third full year, which is crazy to think about. So thank you to all the old listeners, the new listeners, the occasional listeners.

This really is, sincerely, sincerely, one of the most fun things I have ever had the fortune to do in my career. And I am really so deeply appreciative of everyone who bears with me through the bad metaphors and the hairbrain theories. I just have a blast doing this. So thank you, thank you for listening. There are a few things that I want to do with the show in the next year that aren't so different, but are just our little wrinkles on what we've done before. So first,

I want to get better at incorporating audience ideas and audience feedback. It's been a minute since we did a Curiosity Corner episode where I answer reader questions directly, I'd like to do more of those, and I think I should do more to incorporate reader email as well. So if you have feedback ideas for new shows, please send those to plain English at Spotify.com, and I will try to publicize those correspondences a bit more.

By the way, that includes negative feedback. I want to do more episodes this year with guests who explicitly disagree with me, even explicitly disagree with episodes that I've just done, I think these kind of disagreements, these kind of debates make for fun radio. So if you have suggestions for guests who you think will prove me wrong about something, please send those ideas too to plain English at Spotify.com. And of course, if you simply like the show, by the way, and you haven't rated us on Spotify or Apple podcast,

take 10 seconds, tap five stars, leave a nice comment. I've got decently thick enough skin for the harsh feedback, but it's always nice to indulge by reading something nice. So the second wrinkle I want to add to the show in the next year is I want to do more mini-series. We have done multi-part episode series on several subjects in the last nine months or so. We've done a little mini-series on happiness and anxiety in America, a mini-series on productivity and work culture, Israel-Palestine. We just did a two-parter on OZempec and other GLP-1 drugs. Those have done nicely.

They've gotten a really great reception, especially, I think, When I have space to take a multi-sided issue and actually produce shows that explore that issue from each of its sides, it's not possible to do something like Israel Palestine or the October 7 attacks in one show and capture the motivations of Hamas and the history of the constant going back to the 1800s and Israel's military strategy right now and the perspective of Palestinian pacifists, that's not one show. that's four different shows. And so we did four different shows on that subject.

And while not every issue deserves that kind of treatment, there are so many topics, I think, where it's profitable to say, for example, like, here's my complete understanding of how this new technology, GOP-1's AI, could be great. And now, new episode, here's an entirely different in-depth interview

about why that other thing that I said might be completely wrong with regards to the subject. So it's like, you know, To quote the great Chuck Losterman, this is the year I want to keep asking myself, what if I'm wrong? What if I'm wrong? So more feedback, more mini-series, send us your five-star comment, review, love, if you have a moment to get the good juju going in 24. And that's all I have for housekeeping.

Today, on the show, we are bringing back an old favorite. Oliver Berkman, the contrarian self-help writer and the author of the book 4,000 weeks, is back to talk about the paradox of attention and our obsession with focus. So there's a little story that I think usefully sets us up for this show. A few weeks ago, I was working on a piece of writing when my daughter was in the middle of a terrible day of gastric distress and the general work of being a baby. And this kept happening. I would get a bit of writing done. And then I would need to get up and help console her. And then I'd sit down, I take a deep breath, I ease back into the writing zone, only for that fragile focus

to be shattered by another piercing sob. And over and over this happened, it was just a disastrous day at the home office. So I get up, I go to the gym around 4 p.m., and I see that my friend Oliver has several audio essays newly posted on the waking up app. And it's amazing how sometimes the universe has a way of just giving you the missing puzzle piece

of life's jigsaw. And the audio essay of that day was called, What is an interruption anyway? what is an interruption anyway? And in his classic way, he said something, Oliver, that sort of chilled my blood with how appropriate it was for that very moment, for that very specific moment in time for me. He said most people who fashion themselves productive

put a very strong emphasis on deep focus that eliminates disruption. But this very attitude has a way of making disruptions more painful and warping our sense of what an interruption actually is. So in the first draft of the day, I was a writer being interrupted by a sobbing baby. But in a revised draft of the exact same sequence of events, I am first and foremost a father distracting myself with work. And of course, in the final analysis, I'm both, father and writer. and things are just happening.

One thing after another, I type a word, a baby cries, air conditioner comes on, a bird sings. What's really the distraction here? Is it everything? Is it nothing? Today, Oliver and I talk about his wonderful philosophy of attention and distraction and how to balance a Zen sense of everything always happening with the practical reality that yes, actually, we do have to get shit done. How do you focus in a world where you also,

first and foremost, just want to be fully aware of it all? I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Oliver Berkman, welcome back to the show. It's a great pleasure to be here. Thanks for asking me back. I want to talk about two audio essays that you recently recorded on the waking up app

that really hit me in a very, deep way. I have written and read and podcasted so much about productivity. And for most of my writing and reading and podcasting career, maybe the most persuasive idea in the space of productivity that I keep coming back to again and again is this. If you want to get anything worthwhile done, you need deep focus, deep work, deep attention. And that means that it is above all essential to minimize what is sometimes called context switching, bouncing between tasks and shedding precious focus in the active switching. These principles of eliminating interruption, eliminating distraction, are so commonly repeated that they're almost obvious to the point of being trite. And that's why I was

stopped in my tracks by the persuasiveness and the wisdom of your recent audio essay, which said, No, there is actually a subtle problem with these pieces of ancient wisdom. So tell us what is the problem with living life with a strong emphasis on eliminating interruptions? I'm very, I find it very appealing to be contrarian about these things, but I also want to make sure I'm being truthful about them. So I feel like I have to say, I don't think that this is like false, the idea that that context switching imposes this drain on focus and attention. But I think the subtle problem that underlies all of this is that the more you go through your day with a very clear conceptual, intellectual plan for how it should go, for what the boundaries of your time are, for what you're doing for the next three hours, and what will be a problem if you get interrupted or blown off course, the more you bring that to your day, the worse it is when you are. interrupted because reality collides with this kind of brittle overlay that you're placing on top of it. And even more subtly, perhaps, that more things end up getting defined as interruptions and as problems.

Can you give me an example of this idea that we are quietly driving ourselves crazy by over-defining interruptions as problems? If I'm working from home and it's the afternoon and it's a part of the day when my arrangement with my partner that day is that I'm working and she is hanging out with our seven-year-old son, like if he bursts into the room to tell me excitedly about something that happened to him at school that day, as he may do in the middle of this podcast recording just as a warning, that, you know, there's a moment. maybe context where I can't entertain that interruption, but I don't want to be deliberately signing up to an approach to productivity that, first of all, defines that lovely moment as a bad

thing because it doesn't fit my scheme. When I'm someone who does have, you know, the good fortune and the privilege to be able to entertain that interruption, obviously if I was not working at home or working for a terrible boss who would defy me the moment I'm. I was distracted, I couldn't do that, but I can, and I'm kind of got this self-im-imposed desire to turn it into a problem because I've got my little schedule drawn up and it contradicts that schedule. I was just going to say alongside that, there's always been this question in my mind when the costs of task switching, costs of interruption are discussed in that kind of, often with, you know, reliance on neuroscience and stuff.

I'm always wondering, like, why is the conversation always about responding to that situation by trying to eliminate task switching and never about getting better at task switching? I mean, if all this stuff about neural plasticity is where it's at, then maybe we ought to be able to be able to get a little bit better at moving between tasks in that fashion. when I heard the audio essay, I immediately sent it to my wife with a couple of exclamation points because I discovered in it

a profound critique of my own behavior. So I am a new father of a four-month-old baby who is beautiful and absolutely terrible at sleeping. And so when I'm downstairs working on an essay, on a book chapter, on a podcast,

there have been many times where my wife has come downstairs and interrupted me. The baby's spit. up. The baby won't sleep. The baby did sleep. The baby did something incredibly adorable. The baby did something incredibly terrible. I mean, there are infinite opportunities for interrupting someone working when you have this new creature in your life that is constantly surprising you every five minutes with some kind of, you know, verbal or outburst. And there were times where, to be totally honest,

I would respond sometimes with annoyance. I would say, hey, you know, I'm in the middle of work. Can you wait until the end of the day to tell me about this thing that isn't essential? And I heard this essay and I thought, wait, like, I will always have an opportunity to work. I will hopefully have decades and decades be able to work. The experience of enjoying the surprising moments of being a first-time father, this is actually, this is the precious stuff of life. I've been defining the interruptions as something that I need to avoid and productivity, which I can always sort of muster as something that I need to cling to, when actually I can entirely reverse it and see my life being at home with a new baby as being a series of interruptions that I simply have to live through and not

respond to in some kind of, you know, profoundly volcanic, emotional way. And so that, that's why this essay made such a deep impact on me is, is the reminder that life is just always going to be a series of distractions and interruptions. And while, of course, it is important to distinguish between unnecessary interruptions, you know, answering an email that is entirely unnecessary to answer at that moment, and responding to a child or a partner bursting into the room, you know, that's a better interruption. I think it's just so important to remember. Like, life's going to be interruptions. It's such a beautiful, profound idea. There's that wonderful quotation from C.S. Lewis that I think I use in that essay where he's writing from his Christian perspective,

but he's suggesting that actually, you know, what we call the interruptions is, as he puts it, the real life that God is sending us day by day. You can have the God part in that or not. But the basic idea that like this is life, like this is where you are and you are defining certain things as interruptions. And again, I don't think it's that you shouldn't define things as interruptions, but we should see that that's what we're doing. In his great book, Why Buddhism is true, Robert Rai. the journalist and podcast that makes this great point that what he's using as a sort of metaphor for all sorts of things in Buddhist psychology, this idea about weeds and regular plants in the garden, right? And the fact that the distinction between weeds and non-weeds is one that we bring to the party. It's not necessarily bad to make that distinction and to want to get rid of weeds in your garden in order to let other plants flourish. But you should see that you are imposing that conceptual overlay on reality. And it's the same with the idea of this is real life and this is an interruption to real life. I mean, like, there are times when it's useful to be conscious of that and to do your best to minimize certain kinds of interruption. but I think it's so natural in the culture, right, to just think of work as as real life and other things as not.

And also as to think of the degree to which we control our lives as being real and the degree to which it's controlled or that control is imposed upon by other people as being a kind of an affront to reality. And I think that's where we often go wrong. This is another really deep point, I think. could in fact exert perfect control over how your life unfolded. That would be hell in some sense. It's another thought that I connected this to is that last year, there were two researchers who were looking into the youth anxiety crisis, and they coined this term called prevalence inflation. They said that some young people who consume content about anxiety disorders and talk to their friends about their anxiety diagnoses,

and then go on their phones and do straight-to-camera confessionals about their anxiety, being their identity. They create an ecosystem where people, especially young people, become so hyper-aware of the prevalence of anxiety disorders that they start to process low levels of anxiety as signs of their own disorder, which then leads them to maybe pull back on social activities, which actually exacerbates this anxiety

and creates a self-fulfilling negative spiral. And I was thinking about this idea as applied to focus, that some people have prevalence anxiety when it comes to the privilege of focus. They wake up and immediately start thinking, how do I eliminate distractions? How do I execute perfect control over my life? How do I overdefine the proverbial weeds of my garden as dangerous, life-choking things? Right. You're creating a scenario. you're making your bed

such that you will inevitably be overcome and distraught by the inevitable distractions and interruptions that come across your day. It makes way more sense if you're going to be a master scheduler of your time

to schedule the inevitability of disruptions. To sort of like pre-schedule the inevitability of distractions and say, my life cannot be controlled. Things are going to happen the baby's going to cry, someone's going to burst in through the door, and I am not going to be the kind of person that catastrophizes that kind of context switching because I've practiced this sort

of this prevalence inflation for the concept of focus. I thought that was an interestingly interlocking idea, I suppose. Yeah, I think so. And I think where you're talking about prevalence inflation, it reminds me also of that the notion that if you are kind of obsessively minimalist and obsessively obsessed with cleanliness, in your home, then obviously a tiny speck of dust becomes a huge problem when it's not a huge problem in the context of a more relaxed situation. I mean, on some level, this is the only thing I write about, right? It's kind of ironies and paradoxes of control and of the attempt to control the course of one's life, control one's time, control one's day, the way that

that very easily goes wrong, that trying very hard to bring certain scenarios into reality is what causes them to be so difficult to bring into reality. And I think you really get that when it comes to trying to hold interruption at bay. You come to define more things as interruptions. You come to be more thrown off by interruptions when they happen. And that's before we get to like all the benefits of interruptions, right, and serendipitous encounters. in which actually you might want to be, to some extent, undefended in your time to be a sort of

full participant in life. Here I think it's useful to think about the paradoxical way that even meditation works in this space. Like, do you think, do you agree with the idea that some of the people who spend their life most keenly trying to fully master? their attention might be those who are particularly oversensitive to the inevitable distractions and interruptions of life. Meaning that that's why they end up like that?

Or meaning that the practice of all that meditation makes them exacerbates the problem? That's a good question. So, yeah, it's a good question for clarification. I guess I'm trying to say that it seems to me that lots of people practice meditation instrumentally to achieve greater focus in life. And there's a way in which, and you've just said this, a theme of your work is that everything we radically oppose in life, we ironically revere.

We give power to the things that we set up our life in opposition to. And this is true politically, right? People who are staunch anti-Marxists make a powerful thing of Marxism. They have decided to dedicate their entire life to the eradication of this idea. I mean, what better way can you revere an idea than to dedicate your entire life to its eradication? The same can be true for something like interruptions

and distractions, that to dedicate your life to the ability to avoid context switching makes quite a powerful thing of context switching and interruptions. And so I guess I just wonder whether there's a certain kind of person who's into meditation and into productivity practice who you think gives too much power,

to this idea of the badness of distractions and interruptions? I think so. I think, I mean, I think I was one of them. I think less so in meditation, because I haven't really pursued it as deeply as my productivity obsession. But yeah, I think you definitely sort of build these things up. You build up the enemy that you're opposing so that it becomes much more of a much more of a big deal in your life. And I think you do find, I mean, there are definitely lots of different strands, as you know, within different meditation traditions, and some of them are sort of deliberately based around this idea of kind of solidifying almost a kind of a kind of deep focus that is not compatible with then being interrupted.

And people get into all sorts of strange tangles where they're so in love with the feeling of being in that sort of deep concentration that it makes the rest of life where you can't be in that kind of deep concentration really hard. And then they go and instead of just going on retreats at meditation centers, they want to go and live in the meditation centers. And then they get there and realize that actually half of what you do if you live at a meditation center is like DIY. It's like fixing stuff in the bathroom and cooking the meals. Nobody, not even a sort of full-time Buddhist monks, to the best of my understanding, is actually, you know, their lives are not designed to spend all their life in that kind of very, very effortful concentration. But then there are other forms of meditation that I think are more legitimately about, I mean, that has its role, I think, but that are more that are more about, you know, maintaining equanimity in the midst of things.

I was watching some talk online recently. I think it was probably from Shosen Jack Habner on his Zen Confidential YouTube channel, talking about how he sort of, you know, trained training as a Zen monk. and really sort of looking forward to this life of intense focus on meditation and silent absorption and then being told early on by a revered elder teacher that in the West, in the 21st century marriage and relationship was the only true monastery. And being like, oh, shoot, you mean I've actually got to be in the thick of things to experience and be, you know, constantly exposed to interruption and to other people's kind of. of annoyingly stubborn personality types that you can't just change it will. And there's definitely a tendency or a desire, I think, and it's there in productivity as well, to become such a sovereign of your time and how it unfolds and of your focus and what you're looking at, that really the only way you can maintain that sovereignty is by

constantly diminishing the size of your kingdom, as it were, right? Eventually, that's, I think, is probably a really isolating way of life to be like, well, I am in total control, but only because I've cut out all the things that make life sort of unpredictable and surprising and interesting. One more point on diagnosis here before we tell people how to resolve the tension between a loud distraction, interruption in your life, but also get shit done from time to time. I'd love you to talk a little bit about how you see this idea interacting with the themes of your book for 1,000 weeks. An absolutely fantastic book, and I encourage people to listen to the podcast that we did in January, 2023 on it. So much of this to me, this subject goes back to our relationship with time. The teacher Joseph Goldstein has a beautiful sermon or talk where he discusses the phenomenon of mental rope burn. He says essentially, and I think I'm summarizing this accurately,

the passage of time in our consciousness is a bit like this rope. It's flowing through our hands. And we can feel the texture of the rope. We can attend to the details of the knots and the material as it's passing through our fingers. But it's always moving. That's what's important. It's always moving. Every second of pain or joy or jealousy or ecstasy is the same second.

It's the same amount of time. And it always melts away to some other texture. And if you try to cling to any feeling, to any wish or regret or anger, you are clinging to a rope that is always moving, and that will give you rope burn. I thought of that, too, listening to you talk about interruptions. Because every frustration with distraction, every frustration with interruption, is a kind of clinging by definition. It's clinging to an enforced definition of focus that is being violated by the flow of time.

Do you think that this lesson about distraction, interruption, sort of lives comfortably with the themes and theses of 4,000 weeks? I think it does, and I think in certain ways maybe it is also kind of a development in certain ways. But what I was really focusing on in 4,000 weeks, well, it was two things, and I think we focused on the first of these, maybe more in our conversation, is just the ramifications of our being limited and finite when it comes to the core. quantity of things that we can expect to do in our time, in a day or in a lifetime. So that real sort of total mismatch between the infinity of incoming tasks, opportunities, of felt obligations, and the fact that we can only do one thing at a time, 24 hours a day, around 4,000 weeks in a life. But there is this other side, which was more the kind of the second half of the book,

about the limited control we have even over how that time unfold. So, you know, even if you're completely, even if you're completely reconciled, which I'm not sure anybody is, but even if you're completely reconciled to only being able to get around to doing a handful of the things that you might want to do, even then you don't really exert very much influence over how a life unfolds in which you're trying to do them. And I think that almost everything that goes wrong in our relationship to time can be attributed to this notion of trying to exert more control over it than it's actually our gift as humans to do.

And that, I would say, is what clinging onto the rope is an attempt to exert the control too, right? And it's all sort of focused on building up this feeling of being in control. When you sit down at 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock in the morning and you make your plan for the day and you really sort of rigorously specify the timings everything's going to happen,

you feel great at that moment. You feel in charge of your life. But the rubber hits the road, obviously, in each unfolding moment. And that's when you sort of have created the conditions to end up feeling like a failure because you didn't stick to your plan when, in fact, you know, you just brought that plan, at least that version of the plan,

into existence as a kind of an emotional bolster to yourself. You didn't need it. It wasn't, it wasn't sort of given or it wasn't an essential thing. It was something that you did try to make yourself feel better and ended up making yourself feel worse. So maybe, you know, holding that whole thing a lot more loosely would be wise. So eventually people have to work. They have to work. get things done? How do you suggest that things get done under this paradigm that life is in many ways just a series of distractions and interruptions punctuated by our occasional effort to wrangle self-enforce productivity out of the mess that is life? Like, how do we have both at the same time?

This sort of enlightened Zen approach to distractions and also not getting fired? I think there are so many useful productivity techniques, and I'll mention a couple, but what it all comes down to is not, I think, the specific technique, but the spirit in which you adopt that technique. So I think there are lots and lots of ways you can bring some shape and some intentionality to your day without it slipping over into this kind of futile and self-undermining attempt to, to be in full control of it. It's a question of making sure that the rules you follow serve you and serve your reality instead of getting into a situation where you're so obsessed with serving the rule that it makes things go wrong. One of the ones I've mentioned here and there is the idea of, in the context of morning routines,

for example, if you're a parent or new parent, I know you are, and any idea that you're going to follow kind of... strict timings, get up at a very specific time and then do six specific things before you begin the workday. That's kind of off the table. But the idea that there's maybe four things that you want to get to before you start work and you're going to do one of them, do the first half of the second, then get interrupted for a while by stuff to do with the baby and then go back to the next one. You still give some order to what you're planning to do without without linking it so tightly to specific times

that it starts to become self-defeating. I think that any kind of ideas like, you know, all these ideas like choosing three important things you want to make sure you get down a sort of a must-do list for the day, one that very deliberately is intended to take much less time than you expect to have. That's a way to sort of slightly

short circuit, the planning fallacy or whatever, you know, to sort of say, well, listen, I'm so bad at knowing how much time I'll have of these things. I'm not even going to pretend that that's what I'm doing. I'm going to say, here are three things that I would expect to take about an hour and a half in total. Surprising how often even those can end up taking a whole day, but I guess that's another story. For me, it's not a question of giving a job to every hour of the day. It's a question of having a few things that I absolutely intend to get done pretty much come what may, and then a big menu of other things to pick from as the time permits. And actually, as my mood permits, because one thing that we haven't really touched on here is one of the things we get interrupted by is internal interruptions,

like internal refusals to do the thing that we thought we were going to want to do at 945 till 10.30 that day. And how to deal with that is fascinating. And the older I get, the more I think the answer is you have to somehow harness that stuff instead of just scream in its face and say, go away, recalcitrant mood. I won't have anything to do with you. That has the same counterproductive effect. And there is something to be said for doing what you feel like doing. I love this idea of internal interruptions.

The I just don't feel like it impulse. I have only written one essay on procrastination. But I remember I made this little graphic of what I called the procrastination doom loop, where you tell yourself, well, my mood isn't right to do this work now. I'll just do the work later when my mood improves. And then later comes around and your mood hasn't changed at all. And actually on top of your mood not having changed, there's shame for not having done the work in the first place.

And that just deepens the aversion. Like, how do we get out of this? How do we deal with the distractions that come from within us, from our own mood? disinclination to work. One of the points I really wanted to make in 4,000 weeks was this idea that a lot of our trouble with distraction does not come from having social media sites kind of reach in and steal our focus away from what we're doing. But it comes from having some objection, some emotional barrier to what we're doing.

The thing we thought we wanted to do, the difficult but important work we were addressing ourselves to or the challenging conversation we were trying to have. and how appealing it is then to sort of slide off into distractions instead so that the sort of the call is coming from inside the house. And I think another way to think of that is as an internal interruption, right? You decide that what you're going to do is Project X because it's 1030 in the morning and that's what you're going to work on then for a couple of hours and it really matters to you and you know you want to do it. but actually when it comes to it, you just kind of don't want to do it. And there is an important distinction because dealing with these things, you know, I think it takes some different strategies.

But the really important thing about seeing that so much of this is internal, at least for me, is firstly you just come to expect it a little bit, right? So you're less thrown off course by the fact that your moods don't exactly match your your sort of cognitive plans for your day that you made earlier that day. And then secondly, there's, I think, a really important role wherever your professional autonomy permits it. And again, you know, I'm almost always aware that some people's doesn't. But for deciding what to do from and from hour to hour, partly at least by asking yourself what you feel like doing and what would be enjoyable for you to do. I think a lot of people, including myself in a former incarnation,

don't trust themselves enough. They think that if they did that, it's like, all I do would be just the fun stuff or the unimportant stuff. I'd never really get around to it. And there may be some aspect of that, but what I've found is that the more you're willing to let that perspective in, actually, the more you can trust yourself to find yourself wanting to do those things. There's a blog post that I reference often. So, sorry if I did it in our previous conversation, and I don't think I did, by my friend Susan Piver, the meditation teacher,

who wrote a post ages ago now called Getting Things Done by Not Being Meant to Yourself about a sort of experiment she ran where instead of constantly sort of instructing herself, commanding herself to be disciplined through the day, she tried to follow just what she wanted to do and found that most of the things that she had been wanting to do in the old disciplined way

got done, right? Because most of us are not actually in a position where we don't care about the important parts of our work and our lives. It's just that we get into these psychodramas where we don't want to be we don't want to be yelled at by some taskmaster to do them at 1030.

till 11.30 every day or whatever it might be, even when that person doing the yelling is us as well, right? And I'm, this is something that is so familiar to me, like going back years, this notion that like, I'm just really resentful of the jerk who decided I was going to be doing this particular activity for three hours this afternoon. And then I'm like, well, hold on, in my line of work for a long time, that jerk has been myself. Doesn't seem to make any difference. So, so I think sort of leaning into that idea of, of, of, you know, maybe quite, maybe sometimes, maybe often, you're going to have to not just go with what you feel like,

but at least letting that question in and appreciating that actually it isn't, it very often is not self-indulgent to ask that question about what you would like to do. It's actually quite radical and almost, you know, scary in a way. I want to go back to thinking about ways that your disruption paradigm lives alongside a paradigm of getting things done. And I want to propose two ways,

which I think the sort of Berkman paradigm of interruptions can very much live alongside a mindset of getting things done. Number one, I know it might seem perverse to suggest that like your attempts to demolish productivity culture might actually help some people get more work done. Like that seems to sort of put the horse for the car before the horse. But, you know, when I heard your essay on this subject when I was at the gym, I returned from the gym and I had to do some writing when I got home. And every time, after just hearing you talk about the inevitability of distractions and the fact that interruptions are just the warp and weft of life, I'm sitting down on my computer. And sometimes when I get a little bit of verse about my work

or I hit a little bit of a rough patch, I click away to ESPN or I get up to make myself another cup of coffee. And this time, after hearing the essay, I would just note in my head with as little judgments as possible. Oop, that's an interruption. Oh, there you go, breaking the flow. The The observation just came without any kind of internal screaming. Just, oh, you are now doing something else. It's not bad. It's just something else. And it was sort of revelatory how the lack of judgment actually allowed me to see the

interruptions more clearly. Like it made me feel in a way more in control of my attention because I could watch the attention without judgment. And I could cling to previously destroy. efforts of focusing on only one thing for an hour, I would cling to that less and rather just pay attention to the whole flow of attention. The second is, I might be quoting you here, but I think something you've said or written before is that focus is not a skill.

It's more like an anti-skill because it's the ability to say no to things. Saying no to things, especially that are attractive but not important. Like, that is focus. Focus is not the ability to avoid interruptions because life is interruptions. Life is a mess. It's the ability to say no to things that are appealing but inessential. And when I think about that, it makes me wonder whether, like, maybe like the New Year's resolution that I could set myself up to is not, don't be distracted.

It's have a superior set of interruptions, right? Raise the quality of our interruptions. Like, look, be able to, at the end of March, when I'm, you know, appraising my New Year's resolution, which might be something that you are dead set against. But, you know, it's the end of March. And I'm thinking, you know, how am I doing? I might say, you know what? My interruptions and disruptions this year have been joyous. I was working on an article, and then I got to play with my baby.

I was working on a podcast, and then I had a really meaningful conversation with a friend. And the playing with the baby and having the conversation with a friend, that is not what I set up to do at 2.30 p.m. on a Tuesday. but they were great interruptions, right? So in a way, it's like, have 10x the quality of your interruptions, something like that as a way of combining the Cal Newportism and the Oliver Berkmanism in this podcast. I really, really like that. And I, yeah, just a couple of thoughts that just follow on from it.

Firstly, I am very much into the idea and the hope that my kind of anti-productivity thing, schick, can help people become more productive. I mean, I really, I don't think that's a contradiction at all. I think it's a question of becoming more conscious and focused and making wiser choices about what we're productive doing and sort of finding a different kind of energy and motivation to bring to that. So I'm all for the idea that this is really ultimately,

you know, in tune with, in harmony with productivity, not about meaningful productivity, not about getting rid of it altogether. And your point about higher quality interruptions reminds me of sort of an elaboration of that may be that I attribute, I think I should give credit to a great little book called Time Surfing by a Dutch author called Paul Lumen's, where one of the arguments he makes is that once you're interrupted, once what he calls a drop-in has dropped in to your sense. schedule, and I think that even just that language is quite nice because it makes it more neutral. It's not necessarily a bad thing that you are interrupted. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But once the drop-in has arrived, give it your full attention and avoid this tendency that I think we have to be so committed to the focus, not committed enough to have stopped the

interruption, I guess, but so committed to it that you sort of keep a lot of your brain kind of back from the moment, right? So, yeah, even if my son interrupts me in a context that isn't lovely, often is wonderful, but if it is just kind of like some kind of pestering question and I'm right in the middle of something and I wished it hadn't happened. And once it's happened, everybody is happier if I can turn away from the keyboard, look him in the eye, answer the question that he's asking, find the thing that he's looking for, make sure he's got it. If I'm just like, no, no, no, no, no, go away, go away, go away. That is the way to guarantee another repeat visit in two seconds, right?

So I think in some ways what I'm suggesting is one of the ways to make the quality of your interruptions better in the way that you suggest may simply be to pay fuller attention to them and not to leave half your brain on the project you're working on. Now, on some level, maybe this is saying, like, just don't experience the, costs of task switching. So maybe it's not something we can fully choose to do. But I think there's lots to be said for it, especially with more irritating interruptions, right? Never mind, my wonderful son. Like something coming into your day that you just didn't want to have in your day at all, but you've got no choice. Like, there is so much to be said for just turning to it,

dealing with it, getting it off your desk, instead of constantly trying to hold it at bay for the rest of the day. Right. It's being in two moments at once. That's the rope burn, right? It's talking to your child while actually thinking about work. It's talking to your wife, but actually thinking about your child. It's, you know, it's this, it's this, this, that palimcessesst of putting two moments on top of each other when they cannot be on top of each other, when you cannot adequately pay attention to two things at once. That's, that's the rope burn that, that, um, that Joseph Goldstein was talking about. Right. And we all do it a bit, we all do it a bit, but no need to adopt a productivity system that makes it 10 times worse, right? Yeah. Right. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Live life and recognize that

its inevitabilities are not something that you can defeat, even with the greatest of all possible plans. Oliver, this was incredibly educational for me. Happy New Year. I wish for you a year of exquisite drop-ins and joyful interruptions, and I really appreciate your wisdom on this show. Same to you and same here. Thanks very much indeed, Derek. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Biroldi. We've got new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. If you like what you're hearing, give us five stars and a nice review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. For feedback and episode suggestions, email us at plain English at Spotify.com.