How to Work - One

A few of you have asked questions about effective ways to work. So I am starting a series of posts on that subject.

We start with the Milk Desk (pictured), which takes the increasingly ubiquitous Jonathan Ive approach to design and deploys it in a desk. Quite a beauty isn't it? See the slick website here.

The thing about the desk is that it is totally devoid of distractions and this is the first rule of how to work.

Turn the phone off and close Facebook. Put away your magazines and gadgets. Hide the biscuits and finish the tea. Be ruthlessly brutal in dispensing with things you know might distract you.

If your need for Internet distractions is close to pathological (like mine), try blocking web pages you know you might want to visit (Facebook, Gmail, BBC News, etc) using this.

Do what needs to be done to achieve minimalist basics. This is because distractions mean interruption. And interruption is a kick in the cognitive nuts. Interruptions mean you’ll take longer to get back to where you were and you’ll also make more mistakes doing so. (See my other blog for a more extensive article on interruption or have fun with this beast.)

Not only is interruption the hand that knocks all your papers out your hand, it is also is bad for memory formation, which is clearly bad news during revision. In Modulation of competing memory systems by distraction, a paper in PNAS, the authors report that multi-tasking adversely affects how you learn. The more complex the topic, the more attention it needs and the more memory suffers if you split your attention doing other things. See this article for a summary of the paper.

You might think distractions lubricate the painful and unnatural process of revision, but in reality they are just diluting its potency and augmenting it duration. Be strict with yourself; work more intensely and you'll work less.