Increase Focus and Attention

While working on a presentation about pragmatic programming back in 2000, I came across a remarkably odd news story. There was this elderly lady in Darby, Pennsylvania, who was walking down the street to her local grocery store. A young man came running up the street and slammed into her but kept running. Fearing she had been mugged, the woman quickly felt for her purse and valuables. She was fine, but quite shaken, and proceeded on to the grocery store.

She talked to several people in the store, checked out her purchase of Oreo cookies and a newspaper, and left. It was only once she returned home that her daughter screamed as she saw the handle of a steak knife sticking out of the woman’s neck.

It’s amazing what you can miss when distracted. Worried at being robbed, the old lady did not particularly notice the dull pain in her neck where she had been stabbed.

If you can miss obvious things—like a knife sticking out of your neck—just think what else might be going on around you that has escaped your attention.

Attention Deficit

Your attention is in short supply. There is only so much you can pay attention to, and there are so many things that compete for your attention daily.

There’s a well-known design problem in multiprocessor systems: if you’re not careful, you can spend all the CPU cycles coordinating tasks with all the other CPUs and not actually get any work done. Similarly, it’s easy for us humans to divide our attention fecklessly such that nothing receives our full attention and so nothing effective gets done.

Competition for your attention isn’t always external, either. For instance, as we saw in ​Draw on the Right Side​, your L-mode CPU has a sort of “idle loop” routine. If nothing more pressing is commanding your attention, your idle loop will chatter away on some low-grade worry or indolent concern, such as “What’s for lunch?,” or replay a traffic incident or argument. This of course then interferes with R-mode processing, and you’re back to working with half a brain again.

Beware idle-loop chatter.

You might hear yourself often saying, “I’d love to, but I don’t have the time.” Or some new task comes up at work, and you think you just don’t have the time to attend to it. It’s not really time that’s the issue. As noted earlier (in ​Create a Pragmatic Investment Plan​), time is just something you allocate. It’s not that we’re out of time; we’re out of attention. So instead of saying you don’t have time, it’s probably more accurate to say you don’t have the bandwidth. When you overload your bandwidth—your attentional resources—you’ll miss things. You won’t learn, you won’t perform your work well, and your family will begin to think maybe you have a brain tumor or something.

If you’re paying attention—really paying attention—you can accomplish marvelous things. Paul Graham, in his book Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age [Gra04], suggests that “a navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb aircraft at 140mph on a pitching carrier deck at night more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel.”

Having been a teenager once, I can easily recall what was on my mind as I stood patiently in front of the toaster. And it had nothing to do with English muffins, bagels, toast, jam, or the buzzing appliance in front of me. The teenager’s mind is easily distracted, and that doesn’t seem to be one of those things that gets any better as you age.

The pilot, on the other hand, is really, seriously focused. In that situation, a moment of indecision or error, and you’re spectacularly dead. We need to develop that sort of concentrated focus but without the inherent risk of incineration.

Relaxed, Concentrated Focus

Here’s a simple thing to try. Sit down and take a moment. Don’t think about the mistakes you made yesterday or worry about problems that might come up tomorrow. Focus on now. This one instant in time. Right here.

No distractions.

No chatter.

I’ll wait.

It’s not easy, is it? Much of meditation, yoga, and similar practices aim for the same goal: to offer some relief from that gibbering L-mode monkey voice in your head, to live in the moment, and to not divide your mental energy unnecessarily. The internal chatter knocks us off our game.

A study published in the Public Library of Science-Biology^[137] showed that training in meditation could improve a subject’s ability to pay attention throughout the day.

Their testing gauged how well subjects could allocate cognitive resources when presented with multiple stimuli, all competing for their attention at once. Sounds like a normal day at the office.…

Folks who had been given substantial training in meditative techniques fared better than those who had been given only minimal training. But, most interestingly, nobody was meditating during the test itself. As the article concludes:

“So these results indicate that intensive mental training can produce lasting and significant improvements in the efficient distribution of attentional resources among competing stimuli, even when individuals are not actively using the techniques they have learned.”

In other words, the benefits are with you all day long, not just when you’re meditating or explicitly “paying attention.” This is a huge benefit: just as with physical exercise, working out provides greater capacity and long-lasting health benefits.

See benefits 24x7.

If you want to more efficiently allocate your “attentional resources” throughout the day, you need to learn the basics of meditation.

How to Meditate

There are many forms of what we might loosely call meditation, ranging from the secular to the religious. We’ll look at a particular form here that ought to do the trick. It originates from a Buddhist tradition, but you don’t need to be a Buddhist—or anything else in particular—to use it effectively.^[138]

What you want to attain here is not a trance or to fall asleep or to relax or to contemplate the Great Mystery or any of that (there are other forms of meditation for those particular activities). Instead, what you want is to sink into a sort of relaxed awareness where you can be aware of yourself and your environment without rendering judgment or making responses. This is known as Vipassana meditation. You want to catch that moment of bare attention where you first notice something but do not give it any additional thought. Let it go.

Aim for relaxed awareness.

In this style of meditation, “all” you have to do is pay attention to your breath. It’s not as easy as it sounds, but it does have the advantage of not requiring any props or special equipment. Here’s what you do:

• Find a quiet spot, free from distraction or interruption. This might be the hardest part.

• Sit in a comfortable, alert posture, with a straight back. Let your body hang off your spine like a rag doll. Take a moment to become aware of any tension that you might be holding in your body and let it go.

• Close your eyes, and focus your awareness on your breath—that small point where the air enters your body and where it exits.

• Be aware of the rhythm of your breath, the length and qualities of the inhale, the brief pause at the top of the cycle, the qualities of the exhale, and the brief pause at the bottom. Don’t try to change it; just be aware of it.

• Keep your mind focused on the breath. Do not use words. Do not verbalize the breath or any thoughts you have. Do not begin a conversation with yourself. This is the other hard part.

• You may find yourself thinking about some topic or carrying on a conversation with yourself. Whenever your attention wanders off, just let those thoughts go and gently bring your focus back to the breath.

• Even if your mind is wandering often, the exercise of noticing that you have wandered and bringing yourself back each time is helpful.

Just as with the drawing exercise in ​Draw on the Right Side​, you want to shut down the chatter. In this case, you are explicitly focusing on your breathing. In the drawing exercise, you were trying to block any words from coming. In this exercise, words can come—but you’ll just let them go. Just be aware; don’t judge or think. Words, feelings, thoughts, and whatever, will come up, and you’ll just let them go and return your attention to the breath.

It’s important to approach this exercise with the idea that you’re not going to sleep. You want to relax your body and quiet your mind, but remain alert—in fact, you want to be very alert but to focus that awareness.

After spending some time like this, you can try deliberately controlling your breath. The segmented breath approach goes like this. Consider the breath to be made of air traveling in three distinct segments:

• The lower belly and abdomen

• The chest and rib cage

• The very upper chest and collar bones (but not into the throat)

Exhale fully. On the inhale, fill the lower belly first, pause ever so slightly, then fill the chest, and finally fill ’er up all the way to the collar bones. Keep your throat open and jaw relaxed. Nothing should tense up.

Pause briefly at the top, and then exhale normally.

Pause at the bottom, and then repeat.

You can also turn this around and inhale naturally and then exhale in a segmented fashion, or do both. In any case, you want to maintain awareness of the breath and the feeling of air in your lungs and then let other thoughts just slide on by.

Of course, if any of these manipulated breath activities make you anxious, short of breath, or uncomfortable in any way, return to a natural breath immediately. No one is grading or judging you on your performance; you want to do what works for you. Don’t overdo it; try it for just a couple of minutes at first (say, three minutes).

The benefits of meditation have been widely studied. Recently,^[139] researchers showed that even children—middle-school students—could benefit. Students who participated in a one-year study were found to have an increased state of restful alertness; improvement in skills indicative of emotional intelligence (self-control, self-reflection/awareness, and flexibility in emotional response); and improvement in academic performance. That’s not a bad return on investment for sitting around and breathing.

Meditation might sound trivial. It’s not. I strongly suggest you give it a try for awhile; paying attention is a critical skill.

Next Actions

• Experiment with meditation on a regular basis. Start by taking three deep relaxing “meditative” breaths at memorable times during the day: waking, at lunch, dinner, or before meetings.

• Try to build up to a set period of twenty minutes or so every day, preferably at the same time. Can you begin to quiet your inner thoughts?

Try this before reading the next section.

You need to stop reading now and try this; otherwise you’ll be breathing funny while trying to read, and you won’t be paying attention to the next section, which, oddly enough, is about deliberately not paying attention.