In an age where information overloads us, where distractions hide behind every pixel and notifications pounce us like hungry lions in the savannah, one thing remains who-fully out of reach: The joy staying in the zone and getting something done. Of experiencing moments where you are in control of what you want to create or consume. Without external distractions or luring internal seductions of "popping off and doing something else".
This is part of my daily struggle. A landscape of unfinished projects, half-written articles, semi-recorded podcasts and countless ‘open ends’ that never seem to get "tied up". Books half read, movies half watched, walls half papered (yes) and the general feeling that while things seem to be going in all directions at once, nothing is moving forward.
So in my perpetual quest for focus I have stumbled upon some small nuggets of wisdom that helped me make small but meaningful progress, and today I wanted to share a few that have kinda worked for me.
Smaller screens
Contrary to popular opinion "bigger" is not always "better". At least that is what I found when it comes to screens. Professionally I have a lot going on during a workday. Multiple windows need to be open, several things are going on at the same time and my focus needs to hop around like a small bird being chased through the desert by a coyote flying a fully armed black hawk attack helicopter. Pretty soon that massive screen-size clutters up more and more and I feel the need to declare "attention bankruptcy", reboot and try to start over.
To find more focus I’ve found out that smaller screens can be an advantage. The amount of information they carry is smaller (at least if you keep a font size that does not require the use of a space satellite to decipher what’s in the EULA). For focus I sometimes switch back to just my 13 inch laptop screen or the one of my 10 inch Tablet. My field of view is not cluttered by open windows and floating applications and I can just do one thing at a time.
Fullscreen apps
The curse of a windowed user interface is that you have several windows open at once. Each with a certain task, filled with information, waiting for your input. When a lot of that information resides in the same application (your browser) but is divided into multiple windows and different apps … it becomes a quest to "find what you were working on".
The Windowed interface was made to resemble multiple documents on your Desktop (as in the top of your desk) that you could shuffle around, arrange side by side, stack, move and construct into volcanic piles of paper that would burn the data you need into oblivion. Just like a physical desktop, windows lead to clutter (and the bigger the "desk" the bigger the clutter).
I was never a big fan of "virtual desktops" (more places to misplace stuff) until i started using fullscreen apps. Recently I needed to update our company website and needed 4 windows to get the job done. The one holding my original texts, an AI window to check the spelling (or boost the SEO rating) the edit window and the "live window".
Switching between them was confusing so I decided to fullscreen them, using a 4-fingered swipe notion on my trackpad to move between them. Well … that kinda worked out pretty well. It forced me to focus on what I was doing and I didn’t need a mouse to take care of window decoration (the troubling act of resizing and stacking windows around).
When working with "fullscreen apps" I started to notice how cluttered windowed apps can be and how much time I spend dragging and resizing them around with my mouse. I totally understand the power of tiling window managers but I’m not getting sucked into teaching my body a complete new vocabulary of muscle memory to reach the ninja-levels of window staking some of those youtube geeks have.
This experience on my Macbook has even had an impact on how I’ve setup my iPad. For the longest time I thought: When we get window management on the iPad, the device will be perfect. Well, maybe. I’ve caught myself dragging windows around on a much smaller screen, hunting for the minuscule resize and replace icons and getting into the same mess as I have on my regular computers. So i’ve switched back to "fullscreen apps" for a while and have been "sliding across" ‘focus fields’ for a day or two. I’ll let you know if I can keep this up.
Simple interfaces
One of the other sources of distraction (and destroyers of focus and productivity) is of course the interface of an application itself. I have always always hated applications like Microsoft Word, Coreldraw, The Gimp (and Audacity) for having too many buttons and pulldowns to get things done. When Microsoft introduced ribbons it was a small attempt at getting rid of this interface clutter by hiding the things you DID need and showing buttons you would NEVER use instead.
This is why I love things like Obsidian: The app is simple, it lets me focus on what I need to do. It shows me the options when I need them, but keeps them hidden when I don’t. Screen real estate is precious, so is my attention span. Don’t clutter. When I really need to soul search just why I love command line apps so much (I should actually say ‘TUI apps’) it is for that exact reason. The interface is spartan, simple and in most cases elegant. Sure you need to remember some shortcuts, but pretty soon you learn the ones you need by heart and look up the ones you’ve forgotten. They are not screaming in your face the whole time. Yeah! Here’s looking at you ‘insert-video-in-word-document-via-OLE-button’.
Dedicated devices
If you check your breast or backpocket you will probably find a rectangular device there that can do just about anything. It’s a phone, a computer, a VCR, an encyclopedia, a camera, a VCR, a library, a walkman and a one man porn production studio if you want to. It can do all those things. Trouble arises when we want them to do all those things at once.
When looking at episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation I was always captivated by the "Picard Syndrome" coined by KDMurray and Me its the "clutter" of Padds (24th century versions of an E-reader) that Picard has on his desk, (much like sheets of paper on a desktop). Each pad has some info and he uses them side by side. He doesn’t cram everything on just one pad, swiping like crazy telling the Borg to get him and Earl Grey and admiral Nacheyev to surrender. He has different pads for different things.
My own desk is cluttered with different "padds" as well (although luckily not as many) and I’ve started to assign different functions to them. The iPad is kind of an allround device, my laptop is for work, my small Boox Ereader is for reading fiction and I’ve dedicated my Kindle for study and notetaking. Using these "dedicated" devices in parallel is kind of a physical analogy to the fullscreen apps I mentioned earlier. But it does allow me so "separate" different tasks or focuses instead of trying to do everything on one machine.
There is a delicate balancing act between this approach and cluttering up my physical desktop with devices. but I might have an idea on that.
The rule of 4
A good friend told me that people can only really remember 4 things at once. If you give them a list 2 options is ‘restrictive’, 3 is ok, and 4 is the sweet-spot. Start listing up 5 options or more and it becomes hard to remember what the first option was again. I use this in communication and content creation every day. Stick to 4 … and 4 will stick. So I enforce a maximum of the number of "focus fiels" (these can be virtual desktops, applications, windows or devices) on my virtual or physical desktop. The rest closed, tucked away in the dock or put in a drawer.
The rule is if they are not used they have to remain "out of sight". If you try this you are going to notice how your environment (digital or physical) will have a more Zen like quality. Ok, it’s not the "Look at me: I have 4000 tabs open, spread across 5 monitors and I have enough papers and notebooks on my desk to make me look really productive" but … that’s it right : LOOK productive. I remember fondly an interview with professor Theo Compernolle (ANOTHER Brilliant Belgian) where he clearly states: Multitasking is an Illusion. Having more things in your ‘field of focus’ than your brain can actually handle is not inviting productivity, it’s inviting distraction.
Something to think about, to play with, to experiment with ….. Let me know what you think in the comments or on our Discord channel: www.knightwise.com/discord