Focus - Leo Babauta [43]
However you do it, creating an environment of focus rather than distraction and busywork will breathe new life into your organization.
Transforming Culture: The next question becomes how you go from the current office culture and environment to one of focus. This isn't easy -- whether you don't have completely control over the company (you're a mid- or low-level manager) or you are in charge but must deal with inertia and ingrained habits.
Some ideas:
Give out a copy of this book. You can freely distribute the free version of this book, which is uncopyrighted, or buy the digital package once and distribute it electronically to the rest of your organization, or buy multiple copies of the print book to hand out. It's a great place to start, to get everyone on the same page.
Talk about it. Simply start a conversation, with your colleagues, bosses, team members. Talk about the problems of distractions and finding focus, and see what ideas emerge.
Institute small changes. There's no need to drastically overhaul culture overnight. Start small, with a simple but powerful change, 128 such as: instituting a no email, no meetings, no distractions period for one hour at the start of every day.
Keep pushing for small changes: reducing the number of meetings, having no-email or no-Internet hours during the day, holding retreats where people work in a monk-like, distraction-free, quiet environment, encouraging people to switch off phones and use headphones during parts of their day, suggesting that people set two or three times a day when they check email and that they don't check email at other times, etc. Over time, things can change, but be patient, be encouraging, be positive. And most of all, lead by example.
4: making changes at a broader level
Most of this book is focused on the individual -- how we can make changes in our individual lives -- but can and should we be thinking on a broader level? Is it possible to change society as a whole to one of fewer distractions and a greater degree of simplicity? Is that something we should even desire?
I think it is possible, but that we shouldn't expect overnight changes. The tide of rapid and invasive technology is strong and possibly irreversible. We're not going to get rid of the Internet, or email, or Facebook or Twitter or Instant Messaging or text messaging, and I'm not sure we'd want that anyway.
What we might change is the extent to which this technology invades every minute of our lives, and the ability of people to find focus, quiet, disconnection. Maybe not everyone will change, but perhaps pockets of society. Maybe not overnight, but over time.
Is it worth trying for the change? This is a more difficult question, but we might ask: what would the outcomes be, of changing society to one of fewer distractions vs. allowing the trend of more distractions and connectedness to continue.
A society where people can find focus, time for creating instead of just consuming, time for reflection... this is a good thing. If we have time to reflect, we have the ability to improve, to become conscious of what we're doing rather than mindlessly obeying advertising and government. Creating is afundamentally different act from consuming, and a valuable one. This is worth striving for.
A society filled with distractions... it's my belief that people will adapt, that the younger generation already is adapting, and that people will learn to be just as happy with distractions as they were before them. But we may lose something -- solitude, quiet, peace, reflection, contemplation... these are important things that might get lost along the way, victims of technology and connectedness.
I also worry that the true human connections we make when we disconnect from technology and truly focus on talking and listening to each other,