Gated

“Become hard to reach.”

I need to recover my capacity to be obsessed.

After a recuperative break, my return to work has left me feeling simultaneously overwhelmed and distracted.

I’ve been working long hours and not achieving much. The email, text, WhatsApp and socials have all demanded attention; the technologies have started to run my agenda and left me exhausted at the end of each day. I’ve been skating across the surface but the ‘deep work’ remains untouched.

One of things I like about Cal Newport’s ‘Contact’ page is that it’s actually very difficult to contact him.

Cal is an advocate of ‘Deep Work’: “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.” And it’s that ‘distraction-free concentration’ that I am beginning to crave.

Even though I can only maintain the ‘Deep Work’ state for a few hours a day - which is enough. But I need to put my phone down, turn my email off, close the door and lock the gates. Just for those hours; no-one gets in.

I’m trying to find those moments when ideas and inspiration begin to flow. I might be reading carefully: none of that ‘skim reading’; I mean really working with each word and sentence in front of me, attending to the author’s choices, vocabulary and phrasing. I’m noticing how evocations and images arise and wondering about their resonances - both in the text in front of me and within my own experience. I might be writing: here I am trying to work with emerging ideas and concepts, moving from the imaginal and expressive to the propositional, condensing ideas into images and then further abstracting them into text. In each case, I’m wrestling with how I am forming meaning and paying attention to processes of communication. I’m endlessly absorbed, working at my craft, gorgeously obsessed…

…Until (Ping!) a notification shatters the moment.

After months (years?) of WFH, I’ve known the isolation and loneliness that it involves, and the joy of conversation with friends, people ‘popping by’ on my screen, the fun and necessity to take time to actually get out and meet people, to ‘be there’ for friends and colleagues - all of the stuff that doesn’t count as ‘proper work’ but enables the relationships that are fundamental to our organisations.

Of course, these are issues of balance and emphasis, and addressing my own, all too human needs, to feel valued and, to be in conversation, in the mix of what’s going on, and being seen and heard.

But as I reorientate myself for the year ahead, I know there is testing, creative work to be done.

So, just for a while, I will be hard to reach.

Notes:

Many years ago, I was wandering through a remarkable set of installations by Eva Hesse at Tate Modern. The curator had included a quote that really landed with me: "I have learned that anything is possible. That vision or concept will come through total risk, freedom, discipline."

One of my ‘go to’ books on the potential for joy in obsession is ‘Finding Flow’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which approaches engagement and creativity by structuring our work so that it requires high degrees of skill and commitment while avoiding a life of passive boredom. And, just in case, that surname is pronounced ‘chick-SENT-me-high’!!

Finally, you will enjoy Cal Newport’s ‘Deep Work’ which not only considers the nature of work, it also shows how deep work is becoming a rarity and provides increasing value in a distracted, ‘busy’ world.

This week’s photograph is from the #1000 Steps series.