Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life — Winifred Gallagher

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience in 1991, and it’s an impressive, nuanced book that argues we should pay more heed to getting into the creative, focused mental state that leads time to bend and the quality of our experience to rise. It’s one of the books that I wish someone had given to me when I was 16, and that I also wish I’d been wise enough to understand; in looking back, I’m not sure I was.

I’ve also heard the state Csikszentmihalyi describes referred to as the “zone,” and now I’ve heard it called “rapt,” as in Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. Regardless of what label you affix to this state, it seems, like sex, hard if not impossible to describe accurately and fully in words; you can experience it like enlightenment, then try to lead others to it, but the metaphors you deploy are inevitably going to fail, and the directions you give are going to be imprecise. That being said, some directions are better than others, and Flow is a better, deeper book than Rapt and yet covers the same territory.

Both books can at times feel like extended magazine articles, but Rapt does much more so: the later chapters, like the one on how interruptions harm attention, seem obvious and superfluous. Throughout, general banalities can seem over extended and underwhelming at the same time: “Attention’s selective, this-or-that nature enables you to create a coherent but also custom-tailored reality” or “Unless you can concentrate on what you want to do and suppress distractions, it’s hard to accomplish anything, period.” That’s true, but what if one person’s distraction is another person’s work? What if the putative distraction supersedes whatever your work is? I understand the desire to avoid distraction, as discussed extensively here, but Gallagher’s formulation and the surrounding material has the quality of no quality: too general to really get into what distraction means. Contrast this with Paul Graham’s essays Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule and Disconnecting Distraction, both of which are the right length and come at their topic from an unusual angle. Then again, he didn’t have an entire book to fill.

Despite this carping, Gallagher taps into a deep anxiety that’s increasing in part thanks to technology, and the recent spate of books and articles (in addition to the ones above, see Alan Jacobs’ The Myth of Multitasking) show that she’s not alone. I feel the same anxiety in much of my work, and I’ve consciously decided to check e-mail at most once a day and ignore most text messages. There are exceptions, and in general I ask myself a few questions: will responding in detail to this text dramatically improve my relationship with this person? Can I meet with or talk to this person? Will this interaction make me dramatically more wealthy or knowledgeable, or improve my sex life (the last being a metric Penelope Trunk uses to measure blogging)? The answers tend to be no. So why am I (or, in my perfect, was I) enthralled to e-mail and texting? I have no good answers to that.

About a year and a half ago, when I began this policy, I realized how much I’d begun to rely on checking e-mail as a surrogate for thinking because it was instinctive reflex: hit a spot where the way forward isn’t obvious, check my e-mail. For a while, every time I checked it, I would stop and ask myself: is that going to make my life better in an immediate, concrete way? The answer was almost always “no.” This helped me focus more on writing the novel I was working on (and which is still making the painful, tedious agent rounds while I work on another). Joel Spolsky had the same problem with time wasting and tells a hilarious anecdote about colored folders; as he says, “I found myself pretending that all non-optional tasks were equally important, and therefore, since they were inevitable anyway, they could be done in any order! Tada!” He goes on:

So if you want to get things done, you positively have to understand at any given point in time what is the most important thing to get done right now and if you’re not doing it, you’re not making progress at the fastest possible rate.

Slowly, I’m weaning myself off of my tendency to procrastinate. I’m doing this by letting less-important things go undone. There’s some nice lady from the insurance company who has been pestering me for two months to get some data she needs to renew our policy, and I didn’t actually get her the data until she asked about the fiftieth time, along with a stern warning that our insurance is going to expire in three days. And this is a good thing, I think. I’ve grown to think that keeping your desk clean is actually probably a sign that you’re not being effective.

In other words, he wants to focus on issues that matter to him. So do I. So does Gallagher. But she takes 200 pages to do it, and along the way cites many of the same sources Malcolm Gladwell does, which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself but makes her book seem tired, since it came out after all three of Gladwell’s. She cites, for example, Scots-Irish culture and the Washington Post experiment in which famous violinist Joshua Bell played in a D.C. metro station. Csikszentmihalyi also gets a star turn, as does Barry Schwartz’s good The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. I was about to write “excellent” next to Schwartz’s book, but it’s another one that would be a fantastic long magazine article but really has too little material to stick it between hard covers and make it 288 pages.

There are other flaws in Rapt, including unsubstantiated comments like Thomas Bradbury’s view that “this newly vigilant parental focus reflects the conflict between America’s venerable ethic of upward mobility and its increasingly downwardly mobile socioeconomic conditions.” Downwardly mobile by what metric? But she takes the lazy journalist’s way out by merely repeating Thomas’ view without subjecting it to further scrutiny. There are also virtues in Rapt, like its ability to draw from diffuse sources, and for someone who hasn’t read much of the material above, many of its ideas will resonate. But if you haven’t read any of them, there are better places to enter the conversation, and one of them is nearly 20 years old.