Nowadays it’s incredibly hard to stay focused.
There’s so many distractions around us at any given moment.
Your pocket vibrates at any given moment because you’re getting ten new emails and on social
media there’s all these new notifications and the phone is ringing and your kids need
help and your colleagues are coming up because you are working in an open office plan and
they’re asking you to chime in on some memo.
Maintaining focus nowadays is harder than ever before.
But it’s way more critical too.
One of the things that we know about the most productive people and the most productive
companies is that they create ways to enhance their focus.
They manage their mind in such a way that they’re able to focus on what’s important
and ignore distractions much better.
And the way that they do this is by what’s known as building mental models.
Essentially telling themselves stories about what they expect to see, engaging in this
kind of inner dialogue about what they think should be happening that allows their brain
almost subconsciously to figure out what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
One of my favorite examples of this is a big study that was done of nurses in NICUs.
Some researchers from a group named Client Associates went into some hospitals because
they wanted to figure out why some nurses were so good at paying attention to the right
things whereas others got distracted by all the noise and bustle around them.
And what they found is that the best nurses in NICUs which is the neonatal intensive care
unit who were handling these babies, the nurses who were almost had a sixth sense or an ESP
about figuring out which babies were sick and were getting sicker were the ones who
were constantly telling themselves stories about what they expected to see as they were
walking around the hospital.
So one of my favorite interviews from this study was with a nurse named Darlene.
And Darlene said that what she would do is that she always was keeping a picture in her
brain of what she thought the perfect baby should look like.
And so she would walk through the unit and she would notice when babies didn’t kind
of match that picture in her brain, right.
And they would match – they would mismatch that picture in kind of odd ways.
Like she might be walking past a crib and she might expect a baby to be crying because
babies cry all the time.
And so if a baby was being uniquely silent she would go over and she would try to figure
out what’s going on.
Like why is this baby being so quiet.
Now to all the other nurses a quiet baby seems like a good thing.
It seems like that baby is happy and doesn’t need any attention.
But to Darlene because she has this picture in her head of what the perfect baby should
look like when she sees a quiet baby she thinks that doesn’t match the picture in my head.
I need to go pay attention.
And so she’d walk over and she’d see all these things that are all small issues on
their own, right.
Maybe the baby’s blood was taken from its heel and instead of a dot of blood on the
Band-Aid there’s a little bit of a bigger splotch.
Maybe the baby’s temperature is a little bit elevated.
But nothing that like is out of place.
Nothing that’s worrisome.
But for Darlene and nurses like this who keep this picture in their head, this mental model
of what should be occurring all of those things don’t jive with the story inside their head.
And so as a result their attention is grabbed by it and they start saying to themselves
why?
Why is this baby bleeding a little bit more than I expected?
Why is its temperature off just a few degrees?
And in this case they discovered that the baby was incredibly sick.
And there was not a lot of evidence that it was sick.
And in fact if they had waited half an hour or 45 minutes more the baby actually probably
would have passed away.
But because Darlene noticed all these things, because the baby that she was seeing in real
life didn’t match the picture in her head she acted immediately.
They started the child on antibiotics.
The sepsis, the infection in its system was stamped out.
But the only reason that Darlene was able to notice these warning signs, the only reason
she started to have this ESP or sixth sense for something going wrong was because she
had a strong mental model.
She had a picture in her head that she was comparing reality to.
Now not all of us work in NICUs, right.
We don’t work in hospitals.
We’re not dealing with life and death issues.
But think for a minute about what it’s like when you walk into a meeting and your boss
asks you an unexpected question, right.
Or you’re sitting there and you’re juggling the kids and dinner and suddenly your phone
vibrates and it’s this email that causes this spike of panic.
Our instinct in a moment like that is to react immediately, to type something that we end
up regretting later on.
Or to answer our boss and blurt something out.
And we think to ourselves afterwards god, I could have put that so much more eloquently.
Why are some people so much better at maintaining their focus and not reacting and not getting
distracted by all these things?
It’s because ahead of time they’ve envisioned what they expect to see.
They’ve envisioned what they expect to occur.
So on the subway when they’re riding to work they think about what is this day going
to be like.
I know that I’m going to this meeting.
What do I expect to occur at that meeting.
And so when they walk in and their boss asks them some unexpected question their brain
almost subconsciously says I didn’t expect that question to occur.
This isn’t matching the picture in my brain of what I anticipated.
So I need to put that question off.
I need to say can we take that off line and I’ll answer that later.
Or they have a picture in their brain of what it’s going to be like to deal with the kids
and to make dinner.
There’s some type of expectation.
And so as a result when their pocket buzzes and an email comes in they can say I can’t
handle this right now.
I need to give myself five minutes and I’ll deal with this later.
I use this all the time.
It used to be when I would ride the subway in to work I would spend that time reading
the paper or I would try to get caught up on memos or something else.
What I do now is I put everything away and I spend that 30 minutes just trying to envision
what is this day going to be like.
Because I know that the more that I have thought through what’s about to occur, the more
that I have a strong vision in my mind of what I should expect and anticipate, the more
my subconscious is going to be able to decide this is what you should focus on, this is
what you can safely dwell on.
I’m trying to train my brain by just doing a couple of minutes of thinking through what’s
about to occur to make better decisions about where my focus should actually go.