by Serguey Shinder
I spent a period of my career convinced that my problem was other people. The messages, the tap on the shoulder, the meeting dropped into the middle of the afternoon that split a good working day into two useless halves. I read the studies about how long it takes to recover from an interruption, I quoted them, and I built a small fortress of blocked calendar time and closed channels around myself. And I was still not getting the deep work done.
What finally showed me the real problem was watching what I actually did during the protected time. I would start something hard, get about four minutes in, hit the first point where I did not immediately know what to do, and then, without any conscious decision, switch away. Sometimes to a smaller task, sometimes to check whether the build had gone green, sometimes to look something up that I did not really need. Nobody had interrupted me. I had done it entirely to myself, and I had done it at a very specific moment.
That moment was the discovery. It was not boredom and it was not fatigue. It was the particular discomfort of not knowing, the small unpleasant stretch between understanding the problem and seeing the way through it, which is exactly where the valuable thinking happens and exactly where it feels worst to be. Every escape I reached for was an escape from that feeling, and every one of them was available in under a second.
Once I could see it, the shape of my whole working life made more sense. The reason the easy tasks always got done was not that they were urgent. It was that they never produced that feeling. I had spent years constructing a day that was full and productive-looking and almost entirely free of the discomfort that hard problems require you to sit inside.
The change was smaller than I expected and much harder than it sounds. When I notice the pull to switch away, I try to name what is happening rather than obey it, and then stay put for a few more minutes with the not-knowing. Not indefinitely, not heroically. Just long enough that leaving is a decision rather than a reflex. Most of the time, something starts to open up within about ten minutes, which means the thing I had been fleeing was almost always ten minutes deep.
I still protect my calendar and I still turn things off, and that all helps. But I no longer think of focus as a resource that other people spend on my behalf. It is a tolerance, and it is trained, and it is tested precisely at the moment the work stops being pleasant. Nobody else was ever in that room.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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