Posted on by seasonsshadow

When Can Distractions Help Us Focus?

While I am writing this, I am watching a show with my friend online. It means that I am going slowly, but it is also keeping me in one place to complete this post which I have been procrastinating for almost a week. Similarly, when I have book scenes to write, I jump into some related ambiance. If I am drawing or colouring then I load up the latest podcast from Morbid and listen to that.

At school, I caught all kinds of flack for “multitasking”. I was told that my attention span was short. I was told that I would do a better job if I just did one thing at a time and focused on that. I was told that I couldn’t possibly be retaining information from studying if I was also blasting punk rock into my ears.

Okay, maybe they were right about that last one, but that’s because I just wanted to sing all the songs and my textbook was really boring.

The average attention span for a single-factor task is about 8 seconds. Do you know what the average goldfish’s attention span is? 9 seconds.

Notice that I said a single-factor task. This would be something that stimulates your senses on a very basic level. Think of scrolling YouTube Shorts, or TikTok. Not mindfully looking for videos, but just letting the media come, one after the other. It doesn’t necessarily pertain to your interests, it doesn’t necessarily provide any information, but it does stimulate you visually. For a few seconds.

One more thing I want to touch on before I talk more about attention is why I put multitasking in quotation marks above.

Multitasking implies that you are actively attempting to accomplish more than one thing at a time. Please take note of the word ‘accomplish’ there.

Do I think I am accomplishing watching this show with my friend? Nope. It is on in the background, but I am more or less ignoring it while I write. I am accomplishing writing. I am not accomplishing active consumption of this show.

So then if this isn’t multitasking, what is it?

Selective attention is the ability to filter out stimuli that aren’t important in favour of stimuli that are important.

Part of the problem with attention spans is that there are SO many distractions available at the tips of our fingers. How many people have their phones around them at all times? How many different notification settings are there? Blinking lights, vibrations, sounds, little icons, screen activation, and the list goes on.

So when you have notifications coming at you, emails to check, noises coming from outside, maybe a pet distracting you, maybe a roommate or a child commanding your attention, it can be a lot. This is where the selective attention comes in. Get yourself a good pair of headphones. Find something that you can ignore. Put that thing on to intentionally ignore. While you are busy ignoring that thing, do your actual thing.

What’s the difference between this and multitasking? Multitasking you are doing more than one thing with the intention of making progress or consciously interacting with all the things you are doing. Selective attention is when you only anticipate making progress or being a conscious and mindful consumer of one thing, regardless of what else is happening. With our attention being pulled in many different ways, it’s super easy to interrupt your train of thought. Ping! An email. Bark! Your dog sees something outside. If you have one thing that is bigger, better, louder, and more forward than the other things, it drowns out all those little attention grabbers and distractions. Then you can commit much less effort to ignoring the one thing, and focus on your task.

Music without lyrics, ambient music mixers, shows you’ve seen before or don’t care about, podcasts that have hosts with nice voices, movies you’ve nearly memorized at this point, white noise, sensory videos for babies, and video game soundtracks are all great choices to actively ignore.

TL;DR – Multitasking is bullshit, but if you utilize one distraction to drown out the invasive attention-grabbing stimuli around you, and then actively ignore your selected distraction, you can conquer tasks easier.

I’d love to hear what kinds of things you do to help you focus! Let me know!

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