I have already talked about the importance of focus on work. To improve my focus, being quite of a systematic person, I try to recognise the indicators of the quality of my focus and the conditions, under which it flourishes or struggles.
A great indicator of how well I can focus is my ability to concentrate and write up an article, like this one, for our blog. I truly enjoy writing, but do not write often. I rarely find the time to do so during workdays and when I do, most probably I will shift my focus on a task sooner or later. On the contrary, a great amount of articles on this blog, including this one, have been written during a flight; a condition ensuring that nothing can claim my focus and no one expects anything from me.
This reminded me of a concept I was taught at university — quite strange for a dropout like me — in one of our courses about EMFs; the Faraday cage. A Faraday cage is a surrounding a piece of equipment to exclude electrostatic and electromagnetic influences. Nice! Turns out flights act as Faraday cages for my focus.
Obviously, you should not need to get on a flight to focus. People in the agile communities deploy scrum masters to create these Faraday cages and guard developers’ focus. This is quite more challenging though for jobs where interrupts are the norm, like mine. Being one part running LOGIC, includes talking with clients. This week for example, one of ours had three separate urgent incidents that needed constant coordination from my side. Yikes!
Given the nature of the job, you might need to invent these Faraday cages. This could be starting work early, before anyone else, and keep both email and group chat closed to reduce interrupts. This is what I prefer personally. Or alternatively, you could shut off group chat and email earlier and dedicate the last part of your work day on focused work.
I also have a few non-work Faraday cages in my life. Most important is my Aikido training three times a week. Next is spearfishing every couple of months. During both of this activities no one can get in touch with me and I do pay attention and focus on what.
Focus is crucial for high quality work. Understanding this is important, but useless if you do not do something about it. Set out a system with your providing you with the Faraday cages you need to focus and deliver great work.
