The Focus Ramp - Pt 1
How do I transition into deep focus mode when all I have is a few minutes?
If you asked a Cistercian monk from the 12th Century to describe what it took to copy manuscripts of the literature from the ancient world, they would probably reply,
“It requires deep focus and total concentration to avoid any errors.”
Yet, the Divine Office never handed them a three-hour focus block. No one told them when the next interruption would come.
Fragmentation was the rule of the day.
The monks had to work on the farm while writing manuscripts within the same workday. They never owned their schedule and every few hours, the bell rang and they had to drop whatever was in their hands for the fixed hours of prayer that punctuated the day.
All this interruption was supposed to have produced nothing. Instead, a paradox of sorts emerged. The workers with the most fragmented workdays were the very institutions that copied the surviving literature of the ancient world, ran sophisticated agriculture and hydraulics across Europe and kept scholarship alive through centuries when almost nothing else did.
Their solution? They had mastered the art of transitioning from a scattered to a focused mind in between the cracks of their fragmented workdays.
Today, the workday is no different. Your calendar (schedule) belongs to someone else and no one tells you when the disruption from a colleague or Slack notification will come.
If you only have fragments of 18, 20, or 25 minutes between meetings, phone calls, and answering Slack messages, how then do you enter into a deep focus block in such a short time?
Elite performers like Tiger Woods spent up-to 45 minutes in their warm-up sessions before they ever touched the driver.
Yet, as a knowledge worker, you don’t have the luxury of 45 minutes, let alone 10 minutes to transition into a deep focus state for only 20 minutes.
This week, we develop the Focus Ramp. A playbook that helps you compress your cognitive warm-up session into seconds.
That way, you only need a minimum sequence of actions to move your scattered mind that was just from a meeting, towards useful concentration.
Let’s get started.