Learning to stop interrupting myself
A different way of working
Four weeks into my sabbatical one of the things I have noticed most is how different time feels. For most of my working life, my days have been shaped in response to the needs of other people, I am in a reactive mode of working. I am well organized and efficient, and that way of working suits me. Most of the time, when the demands are not too overwhelming, I enjoy it (but I am as guilty as most of complaining about it!)
I have found however, that a sabbatical requires a more proactive mode of working, where I decide what matters and then go and do it. I also get to decide how long to take on it.
I am used to the available time being the thing that dictates how long I can take on a task. I have an hour before the next meeting, so I fit as many tasks as I can into that hour. I must get this thing done by Tuesday? I create a diary slot on Monday to do it, and that’s when it gets done. I like ticking things off. If it’s a trade-off between getting something done on time and doing the best job I can, then getting the job done always wins. I am achievement orientated; I like getting things done.
But I have started to realize that doing good stuff takes time. I am starting to realise that a sabbatical offers a space to do more than just tick things off my to do list. I am learning, slowly, to let a task take the time it needs. That sounds like a luxury, and it is. I am also finding it very hard.
Always ‘on’
I am sure I am not alone in higher education in having an internal script concerned with an obligation to always be available. A good colleague and caring teacher is someone who replies quickly. A full and growing inbox is a sign that I am needed, valued and important, even a little indispensable.
The difficulty is that this script works against the core purpose of our role, which is to think deeply. Mark et al. (2008) found that people who were interrupted finished their tasks faster but were more stressed, more frustrated and had a greater sense of time pressure. We adapt to interruption by rushing – something I am particularly prone to. Kushlev & Dunn (2015) asked 124 adults to check email just three times a day for one week, and as often as they liked in another. When their opportunities to check email were limited, participants reported significantly less stress but found it surprisingly difficult to stick to.
So we have a working culture that rewards us for being constantly available and I have a personal belief that that signals conscientiousness, and literature that suggests this way of working fragments our attention and wears us down.
In the absence of interruptions, I interrupt myself
Over the last couple of weeks, the operational demands on me have largely stopped. I have almost no meetings to attend and my inbox is pretty quiet. And yet I still find myself, twenty minutes into a difficult paragraph, opening my inbox or scrolling LinkedIn. I have no idea what I am looking for so why do I do it?
Lindström et al. (2021) analysed more than a million social media posts and found that people's behaviour follows the same principles of reward learning we see elsewhere in psychology. The likes, replies and new messages arrive unpredictably, and unpredictable rewards are especially good at keeping us coming back. This is the dopamine loop that gets talked about so often. Dopamine is less about pleasure than about anticipation and the pull of maybe there is something new. Montag et al. (2019) describe how digital platforms are designed around this to keep us coming back in case we missed something.
Whatever the precise neurochemistry, I can recognise my own behaviour in this pattern. Years of being interrupted have trained me to look for interruption, and when it does not come from external sources, I interrupt myself.
Building back my attention
At first, I thought it was just about an addiction to social media and a need for a dopamine hit, but now I realise that it is also because my span of attention is so short. I have realised I need to work on increasing my span of attention by not interrupting myself. In practice that means not checking email, LinkedIn or anything else while I am trying to focus. I check at set points in the day instead, and the rest of the time the notifications are off and the tabs stay closed. It requires a lot of self control.
I have come to see this as more than protecting my workspace. Firth et al. (2019) suggest that the constant stream of online information encourages divided attention at the expense of sustained concentration. If that is right, then concentration behaves rather like fitness. It weakens when it is not used but can be rebuilt with practice. Nancy Kline's work on the Thinking Environment® has taught me that the quality of attention we give others shapes the quality of their thinking. I am realising the same is true of the attention I give myself.
What I would really like to recover is the ability to dwell in the difficult bits for longer, to be able to sit with the not-being-quite-able-to-articulate-something without reaching for the relief of a distraction. That kind of thinking, I am realising, is probably the primary purpose of a sabbatical.
References
• Firth, J. et al. (2019) 'The "online brain": how the Internet may be changing our cognition', World Psychiatry, 18(2), pp. 119-129. Link
• Kushlev, K. and Dunn, E.W. (2015) 'Checking email less frequently reduces stress', Computers in Human Behavior, 43, pp. 220-228. Link
• Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment Home - Time to Think
• Lindström, B. et al. (2021) 'A computational reward learning account of social media engagement', Nature Communications, 12, 1311. Link
• Mark, G., Gudith, D. and Klocke, U. (2008) 'The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress', Proceedings of CHI 2008, pp. 107-110. Link
• Montag, C. et al. (2019) 'Addictive features of social media/messenger platforms and freemium games against the background of psychological and economic theories', International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(14), 2612. Link
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