Be distracted, but only temporarily
Summary
- Everybody gets distracted occasionally. But don't be distracted for 5 minutes then give up and spend the next few hours distracted. Just adjust and get back on track
Details
- You could compare it to a storm in a plane...we may get diverted, but likely just arrive a few minutes late to our destination. We don't end up going to a totally different destination altogether.
References
Quotes
But as we’ve seen, distraction isn’t always the end of the world. In fact, the most productive people tend to be those who get a little distracted – but don’t allow it to derail their productivity. For the rest of us, this might not be so easy. I sometimes like to use an aeronautical metaphor. Imagine you’re on a flight from London to New York. You get an announcement halfway through the flight saying, ‘Because of heavy winds and turbulence, we’ve altered our course by a few degrees.’ No biggie, you think. Until the pilot carries on talking. ‘Because of this, we’ve decided to abandon our original destination and head towards Buenos Aires instead.’ In most aspects of our lives, if things go slightly wrong we don’t
let ourselves get blown entirely off course. The annoying email from your colleague means the project gets slowed down by a day, but not cancelled outright. You hurt your leg running, so you need to stop exercising for a week – not forever. The heavy winds make you land five minutes later than planned, not divert to Buenos Aires. And yet when it comes to our day-to-day working patterns, many of us get ensnared by a perverse logic – one that the blogger Nate Soares calls ‘failing with abandon’: ‘I’ve spent five minutes on social media; I might as well continue to do so for the next three hours.’ ‘I missed my morning workout; I guess today is a write-off, and I’ll just binge-watch TV instead of getting anything done.’ ‘I skipped a day of my language learning app streak, so I might as well give up on learning the language altogether.’
Failing with abandon is a common reason we waste vast amounts of energy. The key thing is getting back on course. Again, the solution is a simple reframing. As we’ve seen, it’s not
possible to completely eradicate distraction. So you need to give yourself permission to be distracted. Think of distraction as a temporary veering off-track – not an indication that it’s time to abandon your plans altogether. As long as we correct course, we’ll still end up at our intended destination.