Focus Your Windows to Block Distractions

Typewriters are cool. Pen and paper feel so retro. They were the way work was done for a long time. We can work that way on computers too.

On my computer I love the option to have a window take up the entire screen. Not just to maximize it to cover the desktop, but filling the entire screen. As I write this I have only one window visible, no menu bar or icons in the dock. Do Not Disturb mode is enabled. Right now this computer is only capable of doing one thing.

Knowledge work, the kind of work many of us do all day, revolves around writing. For hundreds of years writing was a pretty simple task. Whether it was a letter, a recipe, or a novel, the person writing had a pen and some paper. The paper could be a loose sheet or part of a bound book. The pen could be a fountain pen or a quill or a ballpoint. The essential ingredients for this kind of work were simple.

Typewriters were a new tool in knowledge work, but the essential task was the same. One sheet of paper and one typewriter. The writer pressed on keys, letters and symbols were imprinted on the paper, and that was that. It wasn’t very efficient and if you made a mistake it meant some sort of manual correction, but pen and paper had the same challenge.

Computers and mobile devices changed this. Fixing mistakes was so easy! Press a key and delete the mistake. Sharing the work was much easier too. Email meant sending your work cost nothing and it arrived in an instant.

Technology made things better in so many ways, but it has also changed the equation. Rather than facilitating the basic tasks we do, it actively tries to take our attention away from that task. How many of your phone’s notifications do you really need to see right now? How often does a computer ping take you away from something you are doing in real life?

I don’t know that I have very many answers, but I know that when my focus is on only one thing at a time I get much more done.

It seems counter intuitive to work this way. Computers have trained us all to try and multi-task. They call out that this is the only way to do knowledge work. It must be right!

Remember that long before computers dinged for every email and pinged for every new YouTube video, people like you worked by single tasking. You don’t have to revert to pen and paper or a typewriter to get the benefits that kind of work brings.