The naughty little elves — concentrating and concentrating in the remote working world.
Slightly against my better judgement, we had the whole “Elf on the Shelf” experience again this Christmas in our house. They got up to all sorts of tricks, in cupboards, having a good go at our stash of beer, and abseiling on tinsel. They weren’t affected by Covid restrictions or worries. They just got on with causing nightly havoc.
And there have been times lately when I felt like they had taken over my brain, too.
Lots of people are writing about concentration at the moment. Some predicting societal catastrophe. I’m not so sure about that, but it is an interesting area. And it is the season of New Year’s Resolutions, after all.
And recently it has been hard for me to fully concentrate at times. Only a couple of days ago I was trying to write an important report, which was quite urgent. But there was a lure — a lovely Christmas present book, lying just out of reach. I picked it up and put it down again about half a dozen times that afternoon. Eventually, I did sit down in the evening to read it, only to fall asleep on the sofa. Clearly it wasn’t quite so attractive when I didn’t have a technical report to finish off!
But what’s going on there? Why can’t I concentrate the way I want to be able to? On a simple level, there is an obvious answer. Reading the tome is a pleasant and comparatively effortless way to pass the time and a nice connection to recently departed Christmas. It is much more attractive than grinding out technical words and complex analysis. We are not hardwired to choose the challenging option. So yes, that’s definitely part of it. As is missing company, which I would have had in spades if I was working in a physical office.
But it is not just that. There is also something about the competition for attention. I have caught myself hopping from activity to activity, from task list to task list quite a lot recently. Others have rightly written about the cost to the brain of switching tasks. It is true. Attention switching is incredibly energy-sapping.
And in that competition, we make decisions. Those choices reveal our conscious and unconscious preferences. I found that what I was flipping to and what I was avoiding is worth paying attention to. I would have denied that report was tough to write if you had asked me at the time. I didn’t realise. But clearly the number of times I picked up the book tells another story.
Finally, the little elves have something to say about hyperfocus and scatterfocus. Chris Bailey has an interesting book on this. He defines hyperfocus as an intense and abiding “tunnel vision” on a single activity. Scatterfocus is its polar opposite — horizon scanning, in effect. There is no denying that a good report needs some hyperfocus. And plenty of it. And as the book contends, hyperfocus is a desirable state and can be pleasant to be in. But no brain functions well being in constant report-writing mode. Or any other mode, for that matter, we need and seek variety. Its taken me a while to realise that it is neither healthy nor realistic to be in a continual state of hyperfocus. My internal little elves are doing me a favour. They are trying to remind me a bit of scatterfocus would do my brain some good. A lot of the insight and business “useful stuff” is awaiting discovery, awaiting scatterfocus to be found. I just need to get that pesky report out of the way first!
