My favorite scene in Barry Levinson’s movie What Just Happened takes place during an elevator ride as a couple leaves therapy designed to help them “feel better” about their impending divorce. When his cellphone interrupts a post-therapy squabble, Robert De Niro’s character—a perpetually multitasking Hollywood producer—tenses his perfectly stubbled jaw and pauses. A battle rages within him for a few seconds. But when the elevator opens, he emerges victorious, having resisted the Call of the BlackBerry.
While his struggle clearly was for the benefit of his soon-to-be-former wife, the scene suggests that his fight isn’t really with her, or her new lover. The little vibrating box in his pocket symbolizes his true enemy, the myriad forces that constantly wrench his attention away from what matters. By resisting his ringing phone, even for a few seconds, he offers a gesture of contrition for the interruptions that have shredded the fabric of their relationship. She thanks him with a parting kiss.
While most academics aren’t besieged by quite the same level of chaos as a Hollywood producer, they too constantly juggle competing demands for their attention as the quickening pace of communication requires tossing the balls ever faster. As a writer and editor who coaches academic writers, I’ve witnessed how tricky that juggling act can be, especially in recent years. Besides teaching, doing research, and carrying out administrative responsibilities, many professors maintain relationships with foundations, work with community groups, and make themselves available as experts to the media. In the whirlwind of professional life today, successful writing clearly depends on the skillful management of attention as much as the quality of insight or research. I wonder if it is harder than ever now to be a good steward of the finite resource that is our attention.
Winifred Gallagher’s recent exploration of psychological research on this topic, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life (Penguin Press, 2009), relays information with interesting implications for academics. Multitasking doesn’t work, particularly for cognitively demanding activities like research and writing. Uninterrupted focus for substantial periods remains vital to accomplishing anything requiring synthesis, insight, and articulation.
The good news is that most of us actually are not suffering from the attention-deficit disorder that we fear may soon render us unable to find our way home from the library. If we disconnect from our electronic devices and stubbornly set aside regular times to focus, our shriveled capacity for concentration will once again unfurl and flourish. Even better news is that our attention functions most productively in relatively small windows of time, like an hour and a half. After 90 minutes, we need a change of focus to keep the quality of our attention high.
But preserving 90 uninterrupted minutes for writing every day (or even just several days a week) can seem like an impossible dream, given all the other demands on our attention. Most weeks, I block out those chunks of time on my calendar, keeping hope alive. The real trick is to discipline yourself not to respond, during the time you have set aside for writing, to cries (or ring tones) from anything other than the project you are working on. That takes an act of will at least as strong as the one Robert De Niro’s character exerts in the movie. To complete a book, writers need to sustain that kind of attention over semesters, even years.
I admire the example of a highly productive scholar I know who does not respond to e-mail messages on the one day a week she has set aside for research and writing. Somehow the work of her university rumbles on. Her colleagues do not seem to mind the lag time, probably because when they get her attention, they receive the same extraordinary focus she brings to her research. Another researcher I know is making the most of her long-awaited sabbatical by focusing on only her writing in the mornings, resolutely refusing to even look at e-mail until mid-afternoon each day.
When we fall short of our writing goals or run into intellectual dead ends and have to scrap a chapter or two, how we pay attention to that disappointment also matters. Psychological research shows that negative thoughts tend to grab more of our attention than positive ones. It seems to be part of human nature to focus more on criticism than praise, on threats than opportunities. Over the years, I’ve seen that cognitive habit (called “negativity bias”) derail writers, from undergraduates to full professors. Virtually all of us fail to stick to the timetables for writing that we have laid out for ourselves. Departmental crises erupt. Kids get sick. The roof—literally or figuratively—crashes in. Interruption is just the way of the world. Writers who struggle especially hard to finish projects on time seem more distracted and burdened by divergences from plan than do others who manage to meet their deadlines regularly. Perhaps those who feel chronically behind schedule focus inordinately on every missed deadline and failure to achieve a writing goal.
Gallagher argues throughout Rapt that the unwitting direction of our attention sculpts our daily experience. I suspect that a key difference between writers who feel like failures and writers who feel like successes is that those in the first group pay more attention to how much they are not writing, while those in the second group pay more attention to how much they are writing. Some writers, in short, seemed blessed with an ability they don’t even recognize as an asset: They can sidestep the negativity bias that seems to be our cognitive default setting and shrug off missed deadlines with a ready self-forgiveness. They can then quickly refocus on their topic and spend a significant amount of their writing time in that rapt zone that is so delicious and satisfying.
But even when we’re “in the zone” with a beloved subject, we may still need to be mindful of managing different types of attention that animate our understanding. Attention operates, Gallagher explains, in two modes. Sometimes we consciously direct our attention, shining a tractor beam of thought exactly where we want it to go. That “top down” focus, driven by will, feels very different from the second mode of attention, which is more passive and expansive. Rather than a precisely aimed beam, this second type of attention wanders over the terrain, illuminating whatever seems most salient or unusual. Instead of being driven to find a particular thing, this type of focus, which Gallagher dubs “bottom-up attention,” simply notices what is there, registering all its aspects.
Writing, like every creative activity, surely requires some switching between the top-down and bottom-up channels of attention. Indeed, field-changing insights sometimes emerge only through what Gallagher calls a “special alchemy of attention” and outright “distraction.” But I suspect some routine dilemmas that plague writers stem from the effort to find the balance between these two types of attention that best fits a particular project.
If we invest too much energy, for instance, in the expansive kind of focus, the work may intuit brilliant insights but fall short in coherence. Or we end up with a manuscript full of suggestive facts and anecdotes that don’t advance a story line or argument. If we dwell too long in the top-down mode, though, the work may feel stiff and ultimately lack depth. The skillful management of attention for writers, then, requires balancing these two fundamental modes of focus in a way that fits the intellectual challenges of a particular project.
While having lunch recently with a scholar skilled both in unearthing significant facts and insights and in shaping arguments, I asked if she was aware of balancing these two types of attention while writing. As someone who has finished a lot of scholarly “products"—articles, conference papers, and now a book—she nodded briskly when I described top-down focus. She’s experienced plenty of that. But when I described the more expansive, lateral sort of focus, she smiled. “When I do use the second type of attention, it always improves what I am doing with the first type of attention,” she said.
As her smile suggests, cultivating pleasure in the process—even joy—may be the secret to keeping all the balls aloft in the juggling act that is the skillful management of attention. The enjoyable experience of losing yourself in ideas, of rapt fascination with a subject, is what hooked many of us on the fields we study in the first place. The happiest writers I see can still turn most of their attention to their subject and get lost in it (at least in 90-minute intervals).
I asked one humanities scholar, whose rate of book production makes some of his colleagues feel like slackers, how he does it. “I just feel lucky, frankly, to get to spend time thinking about this stuff—it’s so amazing,” he said. He explained that while teaching and administrative tasks can be gratifying, working on his writing projects sometimes feels like a luxurious escape, almost “like getting away with something.”
I suspect that the delight of engagement with “this stuff” isn’t just a perk of intellectual life. Those of us lucky (or persistent) enough to be able to spend quality time focusing on our favorite writing projects may do well to devote a smidgen of that time to consciously savoring the pleasure that flows from our state of rapt attention. It just might provide the energy needed to fuel our juggling acts over the long haul.
