A big part of author Colin Wright’s lifestyle is his minimalistic approach to life. Wright travels across the world writing from wherever he finds himself living, and he typically does not settle in one place for more than a year or so at a time. Without a truly permanent residence he has adopted a minimalist lifestyle, which he believes helps him focus. In his book Considerations Wright addresses focus with a short essay about what focus is, what leads to greater focus, what distracts from focus, and how we benefit from greater focus.
Wright leads off with an explanation of minimalism expressing his ideas behind a life with less. Living with fewer things to worry about gives him more time and energy to focus on things he finds interesting as opposed to working on managing ‘things’. He continues with his dialog on focus to explain that another type of minimalism can be very helpful for us on a daily basis,
“Focus can be about mono tasking: doing one thing at a time, and allowing your brain to process everything about what’s happening with that one thing. Conversations become richer, work is easier, ideas present themselves with greater frequency and ease. This type of focus is momentary, but incredibly effective.”
I think that we all realize that our multitasking has negative effects on our output, but we defend multitasking by explaining how busy we are and by creating excuses about the timelines and urgency of our products, phone calls, emails, and reports. A constant pressure to accomplish more in less time forces us to push toward greater productivity, and drives us to perform multiple processes at the same time. What Wright’s quote shows is that everything about our work becomes more robust when we can monotask and focus on a single thing. To tie in with Paul Jun’s writing about focus, we can think of focus as a flashlight. If our flashlight of focus is shining at just one thing, then the beam of light directed in one direction will be very strong. But if we use mirror’s to split the beam to two things, the amount of light illuminating either thing will be lessened. As we subsequently split the beams with more mirrors, we reach a point where the things we focus on become indiscernible because our focus is too fractured and weak.
The other aspect of Wright’s considerations about focus that I am drawn to is the way he explains on the rewards of monotasking and minimalism without attacking the person who is multitasking. As a millennial I heard all the negative studies and stories about multitasking and it’s negative effects on my brain. The news stories and research presented in class always felt like a negative attack against my generation, and in many ways felt like a challenge for me and my peers to continue multitasking to prove the scientific community and the community of skeptic teachers wrong. Wright in his writing simply explains the peace of mind and the areas of life that a single focus strengthen. This is a much more effective way to invite the individual in to a life of monotasking and minimalism.
Novel Learning 