I'm easily distracted.

Don't pretend that you aren't!

Squirrels:dogs::notifications:humans.

On Monday, I misplaced my phone. It was in the house because it connected to my laptop, but where? I asked Alexa to find it, but I never heard the ring. At first, I was upset, but then I decided to just let it go and assume that I would find it sooner or later.

And, of course, I was very productive for the few hours that my phone was hiding in my bed. I had made the bed over it.

To paraphrase Homer Simpson’s toast to alcohol, phones are the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems right now. It’s clear that people are distracted, but we have always been distractable. We just had different ways of hiding it. Back in the day, almost half the people who worked in offices had jobs that required big-picture thinking, and they were matched with secretaries who were there to keep their counterparts on task. It wasn’t a perfect distribution of labor because many people were assigned to their job based on what they looked like rather than what their strengths were.

When the old model worked, though, it worked very well. Much of the cost savings of technology came from the elimination of administrative jobs, taking two jobs and mashing them into one. People who were good at staying on top of details were now asked to become creative knowledge workers, and people who were good at generating ideas now had to make their own travel plans and maintain their own calendars. Technology spending has barely affected productivity, as economists have noted for a long time, because people are now pulled into too many directions.

The internet is awash with advice about dealing with distractions, and a lot of it comes from highly creative people. Like novelist Rebecca Makkai, who wrote a whole guide to managing distractions.

Some distractions help generate new ideas. And often, those new ideas are more fun than whatever we are working on right now, too, so they become something that’s worthwhile but still distracting. There’s plenty of research that distraction, and daydreaming, is actually good.

Last year, I saw a documentary about Brian Eno, a musician and producer who was involved in iconic 1980s albums by people like David Bowie, U2, and Talking Heads. He and Peter Schmidt, an artist, developed what they call their Oblique Strategies. Their version is a collection of index cards with ideas for shaking up people’s thinking in the moment. If someone is stuck on a project, they can pull a card and get an idea for thinking about a situation differently. Eno and Schmidt published a fancy version of the cards, but someone created a web site ages ago that produces a new strategy every time you click on it.

Like:

• Is the intonation correct?

• Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list.

• Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate.

It’s another tool in your anti-distraction arsenal, although not as multipurpose as alcohol. I like how it shifts my thoughts just a little, helping me make just a little more progress on the fun stuff as well as the chores.

What do you think? Do you have a good trick for managing through distractions?