Cal Newport has been tracking this problem for ten years, across three books, the New Yorker, and a keynote stage near you. His short version: knowledge workers are interrupted, on average, once every two minutes. And more and more are doing their focused work on Saturday and Sunday mornings—when the risk of work-related interruption is lower.
You're likely feeling this, in one way or another … we've moved the focused work to the weekend (or the evenings or over lunch or …) because the weekdays are too full to do it.
Newport calls it the hyperactive hive mind. I'm calling it Tuesday. The way we coordinate work—the constant pinging, the ambient availability, the expectation of immediate response—isn't just distracting, it makes it structurally difficult to do the work you're there to do.
That's because industrialized management, the thing organizations use to coordinate the coordination of the work, runs on your attention.
So no, the system isn't broken when it consumes your focus—that's the system working as optimized. More urgency doesn't just mean get the thing done faster. It also means get back to me immediately, because your responsiveness is what keeps everything "moving". The inboxes multiply. The requests compound. The meetings stack. And somewhere in there, the actual work—the thinking, the judgment, the creative and caring contribution—gets pushed aside.
It's the path of least resistance. The easiest configuration that still allows things to run. And it will keep running that way—with or without your intervention. The question is whether you're going to be captured by it, or take action on your situation.
Newport's guidance comes down to two principles: train your ability to focus as a discrete skill and manage your workload.
… two things the prevailing work environment makes … challenging. But there is no other choice. Your best work arrives via the time to do it. (Even if you're assisted by a chatbot.)
"Enabling conditions" is how I talk about it—the recognition that your environment profoundly impacts your ability to do good work. Some of those conditions you can influence directly. Some require a conversation, or an ask, or some negotiation. But there's no way around it, you either have enabling conditions … or preventing conditions … and most of us are navigating a swirl of preventing conditions in order to do what we do well.
Newport's argument is that the ability to focus is a skill, which means it can be practiced, which means you can get better at it. Managing workload is harder. Much of it isn't yours to control—the meeting invites that fill your calendar, the patient panel, the census, the staffing ratios, the emails that require responses. But some of it is. And if it feels impossible, well that means it's definitely worth a conversation.
The conditions that make your best work possible don't appear on their own. That's a given. So you have to create them. Deliberately. Against a system that will fill every available minute if you let it.
It's the only move. An active one.
What is it that allows your best work? How can you create the conditions to do more of that?