An Experiment in Scotch

I went to happy hour tonight with some of my cowork­ers and much mer­ri­ment was had though they prob­a­bly think I’m an anti-social sociopath by now. Many inter­est­ing top­ics came up, all of which I had some mis­in­formed opin­ion on (I had been drink­ing of course) but one that I want to expand my thoughts on was the idea that no human being oper­ates at peak effi­ciency in an envi­ron­ment where dis­trac­tions and inter­rup­tions are the norm.

Gary said that he dis­agreed and that he knew at least one per­son who could, to quote “Focus like a laser in a thun­der­storm”. Well, maybe I should say to para­phrase since again, I’d been drink­ing. I didn’t buy that at the time but upon more sober reflec­tion, I real­ize that we were talk­ing about two dif­fer­ent things which is almost always the cause of dis­agree­ment between rea­son­able people.

Gary was talk­ing about focus under dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances which not only pos­si­ble but really the stuff of leg­ends. Most peo­ple believe the abil­ity to con­cen­trate in try­ing cir­cum­stances to be a gift, one that peo­ple like Tiger Woods, Audie Mur­phy or Michael Jor­dan seem to be born with. How­ever, I think any­one can learn to do this. Con­cen­tra­tion is a skill, just like any other, and can be learned and improved upon through prac­tice and hard work. Granted some peo­ple seem to be more tal­ented than oth­ers but every one of us can get to the point where we can focus in try­ing circumstances.

Of course, this wasn’t what I was talk­ing about, even though I was talk­ing at the time (stu­pid beer). I was refer­ring to the abil­ity to per­form dif­fi­cult, men­tal work while oper­at­ing under divided atten­tion. I strongly believe that no human can per­form any task, mun­dane or dif­fi­cult, with divided atten­tion as well as they could using undi­vided atten­tion. I’ve writ­ten about Scott Berkun’s arti­cle Atten­tion and Sex before but it still rings so true. No novel, no sym­phony, no sci­en­tific dis­cov­ery, no any­thing has ever been accom­plished while also tex­ting, email­ing, IM’ing and tweet­ing, what­ever the hell that last thing is. Stud­ies upon stud­ies have been done show­ing that divided atten­tion steals from our abil­i­ties while grat­i­fy­ing our base knowl­edge inse­cu­rity honed through years of evolution.

Forced inter­rup­tions are a form of divided atten­tion. This decreases the abil­ity of the indi­vid­ual to per­form at his high­est level. Regard­less of your abil­ity to con­cen­trate in dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances, inter­rup­tions are by their very nature par­a­sites on pro­duc­tiv­ity. Tiger Woods may be able to con­cen­trate bet­ter than any other golfer in the world dur­ing an 18 hole play­off in the US Open but that’s dif­fer­ent from hook­ing him up to a remote Taser and ran­domly zap­ping him through­out the course of his round. The best golfer in the world would be reduced to a below aver­age hacker if he had no con­trol over his environment.

The abil­ity to focus is won­der­ful but it does you no good if you can’t con­trol your envi­ron­ment. Good soft­ware requires not only the abil­ity to focus but also the free­dom to con­cen­trate. One with­out the other reduces even the best devel­op­ers in the world to average.