Blurred Lines

You’ve got your laptop open, your phone face up next to it, and someone important on the other end of the call.

Three minutes in, you answer a Teams message mid sentence. You don’t even notice you’ve done it, until the person on the end of the call goes quiet and you have to ask them to repeat themselves. Twice. Not because you’re not capable of paying attention.

You’re not anywhere. You’re everywhere, which is worse. That call costs you nothing in money, something way bigger. Forty minutes booked, and maybe eight of them were actually yours to give. Sound like you? Maybe even a dubbed down version. Hang on did you just check your messages seeing as we are at the end of paragraph 3 here? Please don’t, stay with me.

Have you ever thought that we rarely do anything anymore with full focus? We sit in a meeting with someone and the phone is on the table, screen up, and some part of us is still half listening for it. We train with a podcast or a playlist in one ear and noise about tomorrow’s board meeting in the other. We open the spreadsheet and email is still sitting there in the next tab, breathing, and every few minutes we flick across just to check. Nothing bad happened while we were gone. But we went anyway.

It’s easy to blame the phone. Convenient too. But I wonder if it’s solely a technology problem? I am starting to feel it’s more of a blur problem, and the phone is just the most obvious symptom of it.

We blend everything now. Work bleeds into training. Training bleeds into recovery. The person in front of us gets forty percent of us because the other sixty is somewhere else entirely, split across three other rooms we’re not physically in. We’ve got so used to partial attention that we’ve forgotten what full attention even feels like.

Ask yourself honestly when you last gave one thing everything you had for more than twenty minutes. Not multitasked it. Not half-arsed it. Actually gave it everything?

I see it in fitness too. Same problem, different kit. An athlete running intervals with their program somewhere on their mind but their phone being constantly checked between reps on the side. At the track are you really running the intervals? Or are you doing a rough approximation of running while your brain works a different job. Similar application in the gym. Somehow the session still gets done. But the truth, the adaptation doesn’t happen the same way.

If the phone is not getting the blame, second up is time. The reality is none of this is really about time. You had plenty of time on that call. What you didn’t have was lines. Clear ones, held on purpose, that say this is the thing right now and nothing else is allowed in the room. You stayed at the track or the gym for the hour, but you let two things bleed into one hoping they both got better. They rarely do.

Environment beats intention every time. You will not outdiscipline a phone that’s face up on the desk, nor an inbox that’s one tab away. The fix isn’t more willpower, because not matter what cliche use, willpower runs out by lunch. The fix is closing the door before you need the discipline at all. Close the email before you open the spreadsheet. Leave the phone in the other room before the session, not face down next to you, actually somewhere else. Tell the person in front of you they’ve got you, properly, and mean it for the time you said.

It sounds small. It isn’t. A blurred hour of “work” produces roughly a third of a focused twenty minutes. A blurred conversation with someone you love produces roughly none of the thing you actually wanted from it, which was to be known by them for a bit. We tell ourselves we’re doing more because we’re doing it all at once. Mostly we’re doing everything at sixty percent and calling it efficient. Honesty dwindles.

We all know it. We are all less than perfect. Some try to be better, others continue trying to fool themselves. The key is the standards we want to uphold knowing the results they will drive. Set the line. Uphold it. Then check it again next week, because lines drift back to being blured the moment you stop watching them.

What about this question to finish? No not a deep philosophical one. What’s on the desk next to you right now that shouldn’t be there?

No Weakness,
Marcus