Thread by @devnson

Why do we lose so much time on distractions and why productivity tricks are not enough?

--thread--

Before you say TL;DR, just save it for later.

One Friday in April 2016, as that year's polarizing US presidential race intensified, and more than 30 armed conflicts raged around the globe, approximately 3 million people spent part of their day watching two reporters from BuzzFeed wrap rubber bands around a watermelon.

Gradually, over the course of 43 agonizing minutes, the pressure ramped up – the psychological kind and the physical force on the watermelon – until, at minute 44, the 686th rubber band was applied.

What happened next won’t amaze you: the watermelon exploded, messily. The reporters high-fived, wiped the splatters from their reflective goggles, then ate some of the fruit. The broadcast ended. Earth continued its orbit around the sun.

It hardly matters how committed you are to making the best use of your limited time if, day after day, your attention gets wrenched away by things you never wanted to focus on.

A comment on Facebook. “I’ve been watching you guys put rubber bands around a watermelon for 40 minutes,” wrote someone else. “What am I doing with my life?”

As an average let's assume we live upto 80, which'll be about 4,000 weeks.

As Thomas Nagel has written, “we will all be dead any minute”.

So distraction truly matters – because your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.

At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. When you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life.

All of which helps clarify what’s so alarming about the contemporary online “attention economy”, of which we’ve heard so much in recent years: it’s essentially a giant machine getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about.

The truth is all technology companies’ profits come from seizing our attention, then selling it to advertisers.

You might also be aware it follows a “persuasive design” – an umbrella term for an armory of psychological techniques borrowed directly from the designers of casino slot machines, for the express purpose of encouraging compulsive behavior.

One example among hundreds is the ubiquitous drag-down-to-refresh gesture, which keeps people scrolling by exploiting a phenomenon known as “variable rewards”.

The attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling – instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful – it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times.

It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are – and all these distorted judgments then influence how we allocate our offline time as well.

As TS Eliot quotes we are “distracted from distraction by distraction”

And, Tristan Harris says Each time you open a social media app, there are “a thousand people on the other side of the screen” paid to keep you there – and so it’s unrealistic to expect users to resist the assault on their time and attention by means of willpower alone.

But it's not all about the world but something in us wants to be distracted, whether by our digital devices or anything else – to not spend our lives on what we thought we cared about the most. The calls are coming from inside the house.

Faced with physical distress – even of a much milder variety – most people’s instinctive reaction is to try not to pay attention to it, to attempt to focus on anything else at all

When we succumb to distraction, which is that we’re motivated by the desire to try to flee something painful about our experience of the present.

Consider the archetypal case of being lured from your work by social media: it’s not usually that you’re sitting there, concentrating rapturously, when your attention is dragged away against your will.

In truth, you’re eager for the slightest excuse to turn away from what you’re doing, in order to escape how disagreeable it feels to be doing it; you slide away to the Twitter pile-on or the celebrity gossip site with a feeling not of reluctance but of relief.

Whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude – with the human predicament of having limited time and, more especially in the case of distraction, limited control over that time.

When we try to focus on something we deem important, we’re forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one we value so much.

No wonder we seek out distractions online, where it feels as though no limits apply – where you can update yourself instantaneously on events taking place a continent away, present yourself however you like, and keep scrolling forever through infinite news feeds, drifting through

“A realm in which space doesn’t matter and time spreads out into an endless present”, -- James Duesterberg.

This also makes it easier to see why the strategies generally recommended for defeating distraction – digital detoxes, personal rules about when you’ll allow yourself to check your inbox, and so forth – rarely work, or at least not for long.

They limit your access to the things you use to assuage your urge towards distraction, but they don’t address the urge itself.

Even if you quit Facebook, or ban yourself from social media during the workday, or exile yourself to a cabin in the mountains, you’ll probably still find it unpleasantly constraining to focus on what matters

so you’ll find some way to relieve the pain by distracting yourself: by daydreaming, taking an unnecessary nap, or – the preferred option of the productivity geek – redesigning your to-do list and reorganizing your desk.

What we think of as distractions aren’t the cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.

They suggest then that the solution to the problem is actually some form of acceptance. To not expect things to be always pleasant, to surrender to the boredom and to embrace the difficulty.

This sounds like something easier said than done, true. But they suggest implicitly in the article that meditation could be (part of) the solution.

Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently, or because we wish we felt more in control of the process.

And it makes sense, since a lot of meditative practices revolve about acceptance of the present moment and training our mind to fight urges and tame the monkey-brain.

What are your thoughts in it?

The thread was extracted from "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" by Oliver Burkeman
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