What our tamariki can teach us about focus
On the last Friday of the school holidays, I got to do one of my favourite things. I hung out with two lively, curious, regularly hungry young lads otherwise known as nephew 1 and nephew 2.
Both in their early years at primary school, these guys are a delight. They force me to slow down and be in the moment. One sees beauty in everything around him and draws you in to make sure you experience it too; the other is an old soul who commandeers my whiteboard and sits me down for business meetings (I was delegated the forwarding of our last meeting minutes to his mum).
On this particular day, they blocked the world out – me included – built railway tracks, and got down to the serious business of getting Thomas and friends from point A to…well…somewhere. There was dismantling of tracks, rebuilding of tracks, trial and error, frustration, negotiation, resolution, laughter. And I was not invited.
About 20 minutes in, I thought I better see if they wanted something. Food, a drink, play with something else? But then I caught myself. Why did I want to disturb them? They were deep in an alternate reality. After 40 minutes I was getting really itchy. This isn’t hanging out with your nephews, is it? Maybe I should fix that bridge for them. At the one hour mark, nephew 2 came up for air. Just a drink of water though, thanks, I’ve got stuff to attend to. If I was putting an adult spin on it, I’d say they were in flow.
So it got me thinking. About attention spans, distractions, task switching. In his excellent book, Stolen Focus, Johann Hari shares this finding: 80% of American office workers get less than an hour of uninterrupted time a week. That’s scary, but very believable when you pause to think about it. I bet it’s very similar here in Aotearoa. The bit I’ve been reflecting on is how we’ve sort of trained ourselves to interrupt and distract, or to look for interruption and distraction. If I’d chosen to interrupt those boys, I would have got between them and their focus. No chance for them to experiment, get it wrong, work it out, try again. Or to disagree, get frustrated, hash out a deal and get back into it. The minute I mentioned any of my three go-tos (snacks / the park / making ice cream) the flow would have broken.
For the rest of the day, I challenged myself to not interrupt. If they were in the middle of something of their own, I let them go until what they were focusing on brought them to me. We had the best day together – including the park and making ice cream.
Why does all this matter? You might think it’s because my wife – the leading light on common sense in our relationship – gave me the single eyebrow raise (and an immediate KPI) when I came home with an ice cream maker for my day with the nephews. But really, it’s because, in our workplaces, we have people making decisions that have long term implications for Aotearoa. We’ve engaged them for their ability to research, think critically, innovate, experiment, collaborate, design, implement, improve. None of that stuff thrives in an environment of distraction.
What if you tried this one thing with the team you lead (and yourself), this month: Each week, everyone gets to schedule 60 minutes of fully focused, unencroached time to dive into any part of work they want. They can do it where and how they want, and they can team up if that’s what works. If that’s easy, make it 90 minutes. Or 2 hours. If it turns out 60 minutes isn’t doable, get a team challenge going that builds you to 60 minutes. This is where creativity and innovation live – in that space of deep focus and absence of notifications.
As leaders, how are we designing our environments to give our people more space and time for deep focus, with less of the distraction and task scattering that scrambles our attention? How are we enabling them to design, build and implement systems that matter, rather than distracting them with ice cream?