“If a frog is placed into a pot of boiling water it will immediately try to jump out; but if it’s placed into a pot of cool water that’s gradually heated until boiling, it will stay put and never try to jump out.” - Common fable
I’m going to hijack this metaphor later
Doesn’t it sometimes feel like your attention is being hijacked? You’re just trying to finish something, maybe it’s a blog post, or a component of a side project and then *boom* you find yourself scrolling your timeline. Or maybe you start watching something on YouTube. Sometimes this may happen multiple times in a short period of time, with yourself failing to catch it each time. And you may pass it off as not being able to focus. But I think it’s much more interesting than that.
Humans seek pleasure and avoid pain. Though simplistic, It’s a useful heuristic when trying to understand human behavior.
Novel experiences are pleasurable to the human mind. It’s why notifications and timelines work so well. You’re always one click or one scroll from finding something cool, interesting, weird, funny, etc.
Work can be pleasurable, but the pleasure is mostly found during sweetspots. “Flow states” when time seems to fly by and you’re fully engaged in your work and even that is much different than the quick and easy pleasure of a novel experience.
And work can also bring pain, moreso in the form of discomfort. When you get stuck on something hard. When you get the feeling of dread or frustration of something seeming insurmountable. When you just don’t know what to do next. When you’re just fucking bored. Those feelings don’t feel good. Hey, you know what does feel good? Tabbing over to Twitter or Youtube. Picking up your phone to go on Snapchat or TikTok.
For humans, even the anticipation of something painful causes us to act or ‘not act’ depending on how you look at it. Procrastination is just that. The anticipation of something hard, difficult, confusing, or boring, so you avoid doing it.
If you don’t already know, the frog in warmed up water fable is a myth. The frog will in fact jump out of the pot.
With that fact established, it now becomes a perfect metaphor for our focus problems and work. When we begin to feel the pain, the pain of being stuck, frustrated, bored, we try to escape. We go find something easy, mindless, soothing. Our ‘frog’ jumps out the water.
So with this mental model of the bad work habit of getting off-task to indulge in distracting activities, we can look at some solutions differently. There are no magic pills, but here are some things you can try if you have froggy focus
In the Odyssey, Odysseus uses a great behavior hack called precommitment. Him and his crew are set to sail past an island with mythical creatures called sirens. The sirens sang a song that made men abandon their voyage and sail towards their island and shipwreck. Odysseus, being the clever greek hero, filled his mens’ ears with wax, and told them to tie him to the mast so that he could hear the siren’s sweet song.
Anything that is going to call out for your attention like a siren, gets treated like a siren. Accept that you won’t have the willpower to say no, so precommit to not being able to use that thing. When you’re trying to work, block any websites/apps that you find yourself getting distracted with and using mindlessly. Freedom App, Self Control App, RescueTime are all programs that will allow you to block certain websites for a fixed period of time. Turn your phone off, or if you can’t, place it in your bookbag or out of sight. This way, when you do find yourself mindlessly jumping for something more momentarily stimulating to escape work, you're faced with resistance, which allows you to become more mindful of your behavior.
Knowing is half the battle. Catching yourself before or quickly after you’re about to escape from something discomforting you’re working on, can help you stop and cognitively work out the process of what is going on. You get a chance to be mindful of the moment and understand what is really going on. Am I just frustrated? Bored? Confused? It’s often helpful to remember that the answer to those feelings is not to escape, and that the small relief you’re getting in the present, has a larger cost of wasting time, delaying things getting done, and continuing to develop a bad habit.
Once you build an awareness, you can then build mental toughness. You can feel those feelings, and then decide to work even in spite of them. Every moment of disruption is an opportunity to get better. Your focus becomes Antifragile.
I try to stay on the horse of Deep Work.
— 10xRich (@Rich10x) May 27, 2020
Set aside time to focus on deep work (Writing, coding)
When ever my focus is pulled away, I make a note of it. When I get back to focus I make a note of it
Fosters awareness
So before we end, let's make one last adjustment to our frog metaphor. In the original meaning of the metaphor the frog stays in the pot as the water boils, due to a lack of an awareness. In our version, If the frog is the pot, and the warming water is the discomfort of our work, we want to remain in the water due to our awareness and developed mental toughness.
Work Ethic for Creatives
There is endless opportunity for creatives with the ability to self-manage and self-teach, and get shit done.
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