Thirty-five minutes later, Harry has booked a flight, watched three trailers, texted movie suggestions to his girlfriend, and added some shows he's heard about to their Netflix and Amazon lists. Now he can return to what he was doing.
What was he doing? Right, the case study.
Let's see, he was right about at…the very beginning.
I'd introduce you to Jack in person, but he's not available at the moment.
In fact, no one's been able to reach him for an hour or so. He's not answering e-mails, texts, or IMs. Some of his colleagues have even resorted to – brace yourself – looking up his work number and dialing it. Still nothing.
His colleagues have questions and issues they want addressed now. He needs to pay for his Girl Scout Cookies order. Why doesn't he ever come to the break room? The water cooler bottle is empty, and Cheryl keeps trying to hoist a new one into place. People want Jack's sign-off, his buy-in, his prompt acknowledgment.
So, where is Jack?
To be fair, Jack isn't taking an extended lunch or slipping out for a movie. You can find him in his office, or “vault,” as he calls it. If you could look behind his closed door (guarded by a sign that says, “Let's catch up – later”), you wouldn't see him typing, tweeting, or texting. Instead, Jack leans back in his chair with his eyes open and fixed on nothing in particular, as though he's been thinking about something for a while.
If you want to break into Jack's vault, you have to do so in person. That might mean driving to his building, riding in an elevator, asking for directions to his office, then taking a deep breath as you prepare to knock (assuming the sign on his door doesn't dissuade you, which is clearly Jack's intention).
A colleague – or even worse, an employee – who reduces you to knocking?
Jack is an enigma in the digital age – reachable, but certainly not conveniently. Jack is a digital sinner.
And one more thing: Jack – everyone reluctantly agrees – is the most productive employee in the company.
Maybe your “Harry” is a Stuart or a Lisa. Regardless of the name, the spirit of Harry and his distractions haunt your office. You have a Harry problem.
As his boss, you might be too busy to comprehend the saga of his wasted time and energy. Remember how Harry started early, “leaving nothing to chance”? In reality, he'd left everything to chance. It's why he stayed up nights scrambling against the deadline to finish his case study.
But when you read it, all is apparently right with the world. The work is delivered in typical Harry fashion. The numbers are accurate, the visuals helpful, the results actionable. Nice work from an employee whose talents have not disappointed you.
But they should disappoint you. Harry is robbing both you and himself.
What you don't know does hurt you – and your organization too. Nobody, including Harry, has a clue how far his potential could take him. What sort of case study could he have produced if he'd taken a page (actually, several) from Jack's book, eliminating distractions and sustaining a deep level of focus? On a larger scale, how much further along would he be professionally if this example wasn't a microcosm of his entire career?
But let's stop picking on Harry for a moment.
After all, he's just following the script of a typically distracted person in today's constantly connected workplace. His portrait is sketched from facts and supported by study after study.
U.S. adults spend 2.9 to 4.7 hours per day on smartphones alone.1 Throw in TV, computers, and other forms of entertainment media and technology, and we clock in as many as 12 hours.2 The average adult is awake only 15 hours a day. When are we exercising, meeting a friend for coffee, or playing with our children?
In homes nationwide, adults stare at a TV, teenagers stream video on smartphones, and toddlers flick colored shapes across tablets. If the dog is lucky, he has a treadmill because no one is walking him.
The overwhelming majority of us spend more time looking at screens than talking with our partners. And 88 percent of us actively engage with a second screen while watching TV.3 We can't even remain focused on the device that used to be blamed for attention deficit disorder.
Why should you care what Harry does on his own time? Because his own time, and waste of it, bleeds into yours.
Jack's phone is silent and out of sight, and though his laptop is open, he doesn't let it interrupt him. Put your ear to his door: You probably won't hear much. If you could peek inside, he might resemble the most useless and unproductive person in the building.
But Jack is far from that.
Since he closed his door an hour ago and politely but firmly asked the world to wait, Jack has been hatching an idea that could revolutionize how his company approaches the market. And since he learned to focus this way two years ago, he's been discovering pockets of potential and levels of ingenuity he never knew he had.
Every morning when Jack steps across the threshold of his vault, he becomes a different person. Even the sound of the latch clicking behind is a minor thrill. The devices he now stashes away without thought become, through his mastery of them, tools of focus instead of implements of distraction. The quote above his desk, from Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, is printed on yellowing paper but remains ever fresh:
“Tell me what you pay attention to, and I will tell you who you are.”
Few words have done more to free up Jack's thinking. He likes to compare his job to spelunking into an uncharted cave, anticipating the depths he'll test and explore – in this case, the depths of his creativity and productivity.
Unlike the hunt for stalactites, this is no dedicated hobby. It's a work style made possible by a lifestyle that Jack embraces every day. Despite all his practice, it still takes a few minutes for Jack's senses to adjust to the sudden shift in worlds. But the relative silence and isolation don't unnerve him anymore.
By conventional workplace wisdom, these qualities compound Jack's sins. But to those who benefit from his work, he's a saint. Jack shines as a unique source of insight – that rare person who executes his ideas. And somehow he does this while leaving the office at a reasonable hour, unlike colleagues who spend more time at work but actually accomplish less.
Honestly, that guy. No one seems to know how he does it.
People like Jack swim against the current of mainstream thought – and may be the only real solution for organizations beset by increasing distraction and decreasing productivity. In this book, we'll build a case for why these employees are the most valuable assets of the digital age. And how you can help your own people become like him.
Jack isn't immune to the perils of the constantly connected workplace. What makes him exceptional is his capacity to block out noise and accomplish focused work. If you have one or more Jacks in your office, congratulations. More likely, you depend principally on Harry and his tribe. That's probably why you picked up this book in the first place.
This book is for people who know they, their employees, and their organizations can be more productive but aren't sure how to get there. It's dedicated to harvesting our most precious, and dwindling, resource: attention. The digital age has no unique claim to the problem of focus. Everyone from Seneca to Shakespeare has wrestled with it. But they didn't have smartphones, Instagram, Facebook, e-mail, Netflix, or any of the other marvels (or scourges) that constantly challenge our focus today.
And I do mean “our” focus. I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) as a child. Distraction is the way my brain likes to work – whether I like it or not. The systems and strategies I recommend in this book started with a test subject of one.
As a father of two, I am woefully familiar with the difficult