So I was told in class to sit down, focus and read a whole bunch of articles and a section of this very daunting book. So I sat down (great I accomplished one step in the process) and then the next step, focusing. Within the first 10 minutes I failed, which made reading and comprehending what I was reading 100 times harder. We as a society have so many other distractions and tasks that we’re focused on at the same time, that we only scratch the surface on everything and we can’t actually dive in and conduct deep work. “Thinking I was doing her a favour I made the video full-screen. But this sent my niece into a panic. “Little TV!” she insisted. “Not big TV!” She needed the smaller screen format so as to monitor the lineup of videos still to come. Focusing, even for a minute, on a single video was no good. She needed the panoply, the stream, the comfort of attending entertainments” (Frick 3). Funny enough though, after I read that, my first thought wasn’t that it was crazy to think she needed to always see all the other videos, it was that as a little kid she rather be watching short youtube videos on kinder toys rather then TV shows and movies about princesses or anything she else liked. From there my thought process spiraled off and I began thinking about how the princess Rapunzel would have been the most focused person. Think about it. She was locked up in a tower for the first 18 years of her life. She had little to no distractions from the outside world, no technology and didn’t have the same opportunities as everyone else to explore a bunch of different topics. When reading Cal Newport’s book “Deep Work” one of the most effective ways people trained themselves to create deep work was to lock themselves away. “His method was drastic but effective. “I locked myself in a room with no computer: just textbooks, notecards, and a highlighter”… Benn gave himself no other option: He had to learn this material, and he made sure there was nothing in that room to distract him” (Newport 11). Rapunzel didn’t have to force herself she was just stuck. She read and reread her books over and over, she sat for hours just thinking and creating art. She had no one else to stray her from deep work. In another article I was researching “Studying with Distractions” an additional huge reason people become distracted and can’t complete any tasks is due to background noise. “At the outset, you should know that background language is usually shown to be distracting and hurt any processing of language” (Wooldridge). Again no one other then her mother was ever up there so no background noises were there to ever distract her. The more and more I thought about this, the more depressing it was to think that a fictional character could do better and deeper work than me, and I knew I was going to need to step my focusing techniques up.
taylorsniffen.com 