Raucous home repair sent my laptop and me back to my chicken coop seeking refuge: The world’s hardest thing to find.
I created an office space out an old chicken coop years ago, saving a fir and cedar loft from fast returning to nature under a glistening moss roof. I escaped there whenever I faced big deadlines, saving my life and my career. I could concentrate – no Internet, no phone and no company, critical since my home office was mislabeled: “guest room, sleep as late as you like.”
My writing cabin: quiet except for the mice
Eventually too many jobs required Internet research and too many mice moved in. One night a 100-year-old poplar shouted “Timber-r-r-r!” in 70mph winds, sending what we euphemistically called “my cabin” on an awkward two-foot journey to the east.
Now I have concentration issues of a different sort, same as most of us. Some days I check email or search Google 10 to 20 times an hour, sometimes by need, mostly by compulsion. My cell phone, the landline, the door bell work in harmony: hopeful signs they may soon hit the road as a trio.
The radio was squished by the tree
But before I opened the padlock and knocked away the cobwebs in my quiet old chicken coop this week, I looked up: What people say about the struggle to focus.
The list leader is my favorite study of all time − the psychiatrist at King’s College in London who gave IQ tests to three groups:
• One performed the IQ test only
• One was distracted by email and cell phones
• One smoked dope and took the test
The first group won, of course, beating the others by an average 10 points. But, as blogger Tim Ferriss points out, the stoners beat the e-mailers by an average of 6 points. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, baby!
I turned to my yearly attempt at self-improvement, Sunday newspaper supplements. The January issues of Parade magazine has article called, “Make Happiness Happen,” the authors say, “Do one thing at a time—at least for one or two hours a day.” Now that! I am going to do.
The chickens moved to the milk shed beside my writing coop
On the granola, high-brow side, this month’s Utne Reader describes us as “A Nation Distracted.” Workers spend an average of 11 minutes on a project before switching to another. During those 11 minutes, we typically change tasks every three minutes. Click. Click. Click.
Interruption scientist Gloria Mark’s research shows that when we are interrupted, it takes an average 25 minutes to regain the same degree of concentration. And that’s not counting how long it takes you to find your glasses.
Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, from which the article is excerpted, speaks to me when she says, we must “learn to inhibit the response to the lure of distraction.”
We are what we focus on. By nurturing our abilities to pay attention, she says, we can shape our lives to “recover the ability to pause,
focus, connect, judge and enter deeply into relationships and ideas.”
Will I thank the workmen for sending me back to my refuge? Will I find the mice have all grown up and gone away? I don’t know. But I’ll
find out, and I won’t use Google to do it, either.
