How to improve your attention span with rote activity

I’ve known for years that I have a poor attention span. I procrastinate wildly—if someone or something else isn’t going to distract me, I’m likely to do it myself.

What I lack in attention span I try to make up for by reading books on productivity. At this point I’ve read dozens of them, with the gist of most of these books being that we need to focus on the work we want to do, and just… do it.

So, when I recently read Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity by Gloria Mark, I wasn’t expecting to get much out of it. But it very much surprised me.

Each different type of attention—being focused, doing rote activity, and even feeling bored—has value and purpose when it comes to maintaining a positive balance of cognitive resources throughout the day.

Mark elaborated by pointing out that this means that focus isn’t the optimal state of attention—in order for us to focus properly, we need to balance periods of focus with other forms of attention that tax our resources less, such as rote activity:

There is a reason why people are drawn to […] rote activity—in short, we found empirically in our studies that it makes people happy. We are happiest when we use our attention for easy, engaging activity that is not challenging and stressful.

Rote activity can include anything from doing the dishes while listening to a podcast, to checking Instagram for a few minutes to catch up with friends, to (in the case of illustrator and author Maira Kalman) ironing and polishing the silver.

While doing any of these activities in the middle of a period of focused work would be distracting, when you layer in moments to take breaks, these rote activities, in Mark’s words, help us “replenish our scarce cognitive resources, and with more resources, we are better able to focus and be productive.”

Mark mentioned a woman in one of her studies that told her that “The slightest urge to think about something other than the cold reality of work triggers her to look that idea up on the web.”

That cuts deep. In a world in which the cold realities of work aren’t going anywhere any time soon, I enjoyed how Mark honed in on the importance of balance:

We should […] think about how we can achieve our utmost well-being. We need to change the conversation from adjusting our lives to being maximally productive, to adjusting our lives to feeling balanced.

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After finishing Attention Span, I feel that I have a greater grasp of the importance of balancing my time between focused, attention-guzzling work and rote activity—that Notre-Dame Lego set won’t build itself!—that helps to replenish my resources.

What rote activities do you do (or are you looking to start doing) to replenish your cognitive resources?

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