The Connection Magazine The Connection Magazine Spring 2017 | Page 22

“FOR MOST OF US,
THE HARDEST PLACE
TO ENTER AND THE
SCARIEST PLACE TO
STAY IS A CAVE.”
BUILDING YOUR
FOCUS CAVE
PEOPLE DON’T work anymore. I know, we all think we are
overworked, but the evidence shows that what we actually
are is distracted. We average only three minutes of work
before being deterred by interruptions. It takes us an average
of twenty-three minutes to get back to work.
And it’s not your fault. The problem? Access. For the first
time in history, we have literally no barriers to connectivity.
Let me put this in context for you. If you took the total span of
human history and divided it by average life expectancy, you
would arrive at eight hundred lifetimes. For the first 650 of
those lifetimes, we lived predominantly in caves. We’ve only
had mass communication for the last six lifetimes. Not until
the last two could you communicate further than you could
walk, thanks to Henry Ford. Today, you can communicate with
anyone, anywhere, anytime. And we do.
The result? Noise. Your phone, social media, and your
computer have all made you continually available to a
thousand voices. They’re all screaming your name; they’re all
demanding your attention. You see, technology has not only
made the world available to you, it has made you available
to the world, and you’re probably crumbling beneath its
demands.
This is why, if you want to get real work done, you have to
head back to the cave. For most of us, the hardest place to
enter and the scariest place to stay is a cave. Not a cold and
damp cavern of hollowed-out rock on the side of a slope, but
a place that simply barricades us from the noise of modern
life. A cave is an unreachable place where you go by yourself
to focus for a limited period of time on your most important
tasks.
It’s a place with no windows to the world, where no one
can see you and where you cannot see others. It is where
you’re safe from interferences that stifle your productivity
and creativity. Your eyes need time to adjust, because it’s
a different kind of light that shines where distractions are
removed. Those who develop the capacity to stay inside this
cave long enough for their fear-of-missing-out to subside and
their digital withdrawals to relent are deeply rewarded. Most
of us not only don’t want to do this but we actually say it’s bad
for us. Two-thirds of men and one-quarter of women would
prefer to experience an electric shock rather than spend
fifteen minutes in silence or solitude. But the truth is that
access is the enemy of ingenuity.
Since most people today are passively going the way
of distraction, the few who wake up to the gravity of the
situation, learn how to quiet the world, enter the cave, and