Walter’s story
Every month a robot scans my Office calendar and sends advice about how I should manage my “focus time” at work. Last month, Mx. Robot informed me that I typically have 75% of my time available to focus. Yet it didn’t feel like I had six hours open every day to do real thinking. When I reviewed my calendar for that month, I had about 14 meetings each week. The math checked out, but something still felt off.
Then I received another “insight” from Mx. Robot: it might take up to 23 minutes to refocus after each interruption. That advice is intended to nudge me away from responding too quickly to incoming emails. However, Mx. Robot hadn’t included that nugget in the calculation of my available focus time.
When I thought about those 14 meetings and the associated five and half hours it might take to refocus afterwards—never mind the emails and IMs and the other pings—the disconnect between my perceptions and the data reported to me started to make more sense. This entire episode brought a deeper, nagging problem into focus.
We are working in a data-rich world.
Office work is increasingly computer mediated; in some cases, it’s entirely computer mediated (behold the Zoom happy hour). At the same time, the twin disciplines of artificial intelligence and machine learning are rapidly maturing. Together these trends have been celebrated for their potential to deliver new insights and opportunities for optimization. Indeed, Mx. Robot has quantified some aspects of my working week I hadn’t thought to consider.
The question is whether any of these novel measures will help us understand the quirks of human performance. Our data-rich world has the potential to deliver new insights and opportunities to us for optimizing how we work. However, as the saying goes, “Not every measure matters, and not everything that matters is measured.”
Despite the promise of mining rich data from work environments, the real opportunity lies in the ability to contextualize and transform metrics into insight. To realize this promise and identify what is needed for workers to maintain their focus, we must understand not only the data but also the psychological and physiological issues that impact engagement. Is deep work truly attainable? If so, can data inform us how to achieve or maintain it?
The neuroscience of deep work
In the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport defines deep work as “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.” Its counterpart, shallow work, is defined as “non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”
While these mainstream definitions tickle our intuition, the neuroscience of deep work provides an understanding of the mechanisms at play. There is not one brain region that is solely responsible for our ability to focus; instead, a mix of neuromodulators (substances that influence the function of neurons) such as acetylcholine, dopamine, and norepinephrine are essential for maintaining focus and attaining deep work. (Check out this quick explainer on the neurochemistry at work for focusing.)
Acetylcholine
Acetylcholine is a key neuromodulator behind attention (i.e., focus), learning, memory, wakefulness, and motivation. Children have very high levels of acetylcholine, but these levels decrease with age, making it harder to learn new tasks and to maintain your focus to do so. Acetylcholine is essential for the execution of deep work.
Dopamine
Dopamine is vital for enhancing one’s attention, staying focused, and being able to shift that focus when needed based on prior learned paradigms. For example, you know which emails to prioritize at 8am based on past experiences that your boss doesn’t read emails before 12pm. Without this skill, you might waste time on irrelevant or unnecessary tasks. Dopamine helps ensure your time is used efficiently as you switch between tasks and demands. It has also been shown that, as stress increases, one’s ability to make the prioritizations and switch between tasks wanes in correlation with varying dopamine levels.
Norepinephrine
A neurotransmitter with a similar structure to the hormone epinephrine (also known as adrenaline), norepinephrine is important for wakefulness, memory, alertness. Essentially, norepinephrine ensures our brain and body are ready to take action in times of need. A sense of “urgency” is needed to release norepinephrine within our brains to gain the outcome of increased focus. Norepinephrine also is essential for boosting one’s mental stamina and/or wakefulness. These impacts result in improved focus and increased reaction times.
Together, these three neurotransmitters are important for maintaining enough focus to learn new behaviors and attaining a state of deep work in an environment that constantly tries to distract us. For example, increased norepinephrine will make you feel a bit agitated or jumpy. This could indirectly cause you to want to do something else or change your focus. In these moments, understanding the neuroscience of focus can help you push through these urges to be distracted.
With deep practice, we can ultimately condition our brains for deep work by promoting the release of acetylcholine and dopamine. In a virtual working world where our focus is constantly challenged, this ability to condition our brains for long bursts of work is something we must set aside time for.
The data of deep work
The science clearly tells us that deep work is the product of a complicated balance of neurochemistry and behavior. What can today’s data tell us about “focus time”?
Here the answer is mixed. We have an increasingly instrumented suite of online work tools that provide a seeming wealth of descriptive statistics about our workday. Yet, those numbers are not helpful when they are presented without the context of behavioral insights. It gets more complicated still when we realize that even straightforward measures of workday performance—e.g., the average time it takes to reply to an email—do not always conform to our usual understanding of “average,” making reports of such numbers fraught with qualifications and caveats.
We find ourselves at a curious intersection where work is increasingly online, conducted in an environment which has, in many cases, been designed specifically to capture our attention in myriad ways. At the same time, we are witnessing transformational advances in data science that promise to use data extracted from our computer-mediated work to improve our ability to focus. While the promise is real, the science tells us, “Buyer, beware.”
Understanding deep work is not a problem to be left entirely to data scientists and software developers; it also requires the concerted effort of human performance experts and engaged stakeholders. (Check out this article by TiER1 consultant Anna Grome on how to assess the digital employee experience.)
Achieving deep work, online
Here are some tips for promoting deep work in a remote working world:
1. Manage attention. Many seek to improve time management skills, but if we explore this further, often attention management is what’s lacking. When our time is spent in a virtual environment designed for bite-sized experiences, the constant pull from focused attention often results in a loss of meaningful deep work. Attention takes energy for our brain to maintain, so manage “focus time” on an important task like a nonrenewable resource. Also, give yourself breaks from deep work to allow your brain to refuel.
2. Cultivate self-awareness. Whether we think of self-awareness as introspection or mindfulness, it is the cognitive counterpart to the behavior of setting good goals. We need self-awareness to recognize and dismiss those ever-present distractions in the virtual work environment. It’s one thing to set a personal deadline; it’s another to recognize the difference between taking a well-needed break versus indulging an easy distraction.
3. Take the long view. Work for many has been completely disrupted by the technologies that promise both to enable and improve virtual engagement. While the upside promise is undeniable, we shouldn’t let new technology blind us to what we already know: to realize this promise, we must also understand the psychological and physiological issues that impact human performance and engagement.
Want more practices for achieving flow at work for yourself, your team, and your organization? Check out this article by TiER1 consultant Stephanie Roberto.
About the authors
Teresa Evans, PhD, is a Principal at TiER1 Performance with experiences spanning clinical research, life science commercialization, entrepreneurship, leadership, career, and professional development; and STEM education. Teresa is passionate about leveraging her diverse background to help others achieve their goals, particularly in the life sciences, healthcare, and military medical fields. Her prior published research catalyzed a conversation about mental health in graduate education.
Walter Warwick, PhD, is a Principal at TiER1 Performance who has deep experience developing computational models of cognition and human performance. Walter seeks to understand and improve the methods used by computational modelers to create, validate, and communicate the workings of their models. His research contributions span over two decades from computational cognitive modeling and cognitive performance to human cyber behavior and much more.
