Men Who Stare at Walls

Staring at walls to improve focus and productivity

I came across a video by Simple Lucas describing a routine to improve focus and productivity. The routine was basically:

• Don’t use any screens/entertainment when trying to focus on work.
• When you start to feel mentally drained, sit and stare at a wall for x minutes to recover focus.

I’ve been trying it, and it’s a very effective (but hard) routine.

The problem

The core problem is that most people by default are in an information overload. A paper published in 2012 showed that in 2008 the average person was receiving 34 GB of information daily, with a daily information exposure growth rate of about 5.4% per year 1. Extrapolating that trend, we would be at about 87 GB worth of data today. This calculation includes audio, visual, and text data and incorporates quality into the measurement, i.e. 10 minutes of HD video has more information than 10 minutes of 480p video. It’s unclear to me exactly how the quality impacts things, but regardless it is obvious that we are all being drowned in a sea of information.

I certainly go through periods of “brain fog” and lack of focus/motivation. These periods usually go something like:

• Get a bad night of sleep (up late for an event, kids keep waking me up).
• Wake up very tired so consume large amounts of caffeine.
• Have trouble focusing after 2/3 cups so use media while working to dull the pain (music/podcasts) or take more “breaks” (reading hackernews).
• Stay up late because I’m wired on caffeine and dopamine from scrolling.
• Go back to 2.

I find these cycles very hard to break out of when I’m in them. The media consumption constitutes a small dopamine hit. Large numbers of small hits puts you in a hole, where you need even more/stronger hits to feel good.

Disconnecting

The obvious solution is to disconnect from scrolling, but that doesn’t overcome the biggest issue. When I’m in this “brain fog” cycle (and sometimes outside of it), I will find that around 1/2 pm I hit a wall. My head will start hurting, my motivation will be trash, and my productivity significantly degrades. My first instinct is to go for more coffee. That usually lets me keep working, but at a slow/painful pace. While looking for focusing strategies I came across the life-changing solution…

Stare at a Wall!

After watching Simple Lucas’ experience, I decided to try it when I hit my focus wall.

It worked.

In my attempts, I combined wall staring with a few other concepts I had heard about. First was activating the parasympathetic nervous system by staring at the wall “out-of-focus” and using peripheral vision. Second was incorporating mind blanking which means trying to think of nothing. I tried intervals of 5-10 minutes and when I was done, my focus was back!

What I didn’t expect was how difficult it would be. Sitting for 5-10 minutes staring at a wall without thinking of anything is hard! I relate it somewhat to the feeling I have with working out. Often times I want to avoid it because it’s hard, but I’m always happy when I push through and complete it. It was the exact same experience with the wall staring.

So far I’ve been feeling significant focus/productivity improvements. I’ve also been using some other strategies to improve focus, which I’ll be talking about in a future post. I plan to continue this routine and will update to see how much it has impacted productivity/focus. Thanks for reading!