Chapter 7
In Praise of Walls
Let's examine the common wall.
(Thrilling stuff, I know, but trust me, it's important.)
A wall serves two primary purposes:
- Distinguish one place from another
- Keep out things that don't belong
Or should I say a wall served two primary purposes?
Turn on just about any home remodeling show, and you'll see what I mean. The first thing they do is decide how many walls to knock down. Sledgehammer versus drywall is a growing spectator sport.
Today, we want open floor plans that allow us to interact with as much of our home as possible without changing chairs. We want to be able to watch the TV in the living room from the kitchen while still having a clear view of the kids playing in the backyard. Down with walls! (Except for the bathroom walls. Those walls stay.)
Walls are now an endangered species. And not just physical walls, but virtual walls as well.
The omnipresence of digital devices has eroded the important distinctions between places.
We go to the beach; we work (with Coronas, of course). We go to the mountains; we work (thanks to satellites). We go to Thanksgiving dinner; we work (because who wants to talk with Aunt Milly?). We go to work, and…we don't work. We're too busy booking that beach vacation. And—perhaps the most disturbing trend of all—the place more and more of us get the most work done is on the pot (walls!). Homes have become offices, offices homes, and cars pretty much everything. They're effectively all just one place now. Great for convenience. Disastrous for attention.
Connectivity knows no walls. We carry it in our pockets wherever we go. No zone in our Matrix is safe from the agents of distraction.
At the office, walls meant to delineate rooms and separate the workplace from the outside might as well meet the sledgehammer. Employees are endlessly immersed in a world that won't stop chattering. No barrier can stem the flow of communication and information.
Not all that long ago, surroundings dictated tasks. At the factory or office, you focused on work. At home, you focused on domestic life. That's how the brain likes it. We develop our habits in environmentally specific settings.
Our brains don't know what to do with the constantly connected workplace. It's time to restore environments that let us concentrate. It's time to bring back the walls.
Environmental Protection
Where you work determines how you work. In 2015, I listened to a well-known billionaire investor address a small group of young leaders. He emphasized the importance of making the office a place people want to be. “If you're going to spend most of your life here, you should invest in it,” he said.
Surroundings shape work habits, good and bad. When you go to work at the same place every day and sit at the same desk, your brain, subconsciously and consciously, adapts itself to a pattern of thinking and acting. Neuroscientist Donald Hebb coined the phrase “neurons that fire together wire together” in 1949. To better understand this, think of how a beaten path develops in a grassy field. People follow the route of others rather than tromping through the high grass. It's easier. The brain forms neural connections when we have frequent, similar, or repeated experiences. Once those have been formed, we naturally use those pathways because it takes less energy than forming new ones.
Barriers to Distraction, Bridges to Focus
Murphy's Law also applies to attention: If people can interrupt, they will interrupt. The easier it is to reach you, the more likely that interruption will be trivial. You may start to believe that there are people whose entire job is figuring out how to keep you from getting work done. You are in charge of a major acquisition. Now, it seems, you are in charge of deciding where to buy the cake for the monthly office birthday celebration as well. Think about the last time you struggled for traction on a project because of repeated intrusions. Did your employees know you needed to focus? Did you mitigate distracting technology?
And if this happens to you, it also happens to your team.
Sometimes it's our job as leaders to be interrupted (pitching in on last-minute projects, for instance). But we can also be blind to our own part in the cycle. In the absence of barriers, we might not perceive the cost to our people's resources when we delegate or check in excessively. A primary and extremely important part of leadership is to facilitate great work. Because access is so readily available to our teams, it can become easy to forget they often need us to get out of the way (even if we just have that one quick question).
Barriers are the only way to stem interruption. People often ask questions when they know the answers. They want approval, but they don't need it. They want to avoid responsibility, but they need to take it. Being unavailable frees you up to do the things you need to do and forces others to use their own judgment, becoming less dependent on you in the process.
This might mean retreating to an unreachable place for a time to focus on our most important tasks. I call this the “vault” (which we'll discuss in Chapter 9). We can also create digital barriers against texts, e-mails, alerts, and anything else that smartphones and computers can throw at us.
Focus begins with walls, both literal and figurative.
The key is to have distinct places. At your desk. In the break room. Out to lunch. In your car. On the sofa. In the bathroom (no YouTube in there without headphones, please). For leaders, it's imperative to create a culture for the team that both imposes and respects these proverbial walls.
The late missionary Jim Elliot said, “Wherever you are, be all there.” Words to live, and work, by.
Mental Space
More than 300 years ago, Blaise Pascal invented the calculator, providing the conceptual framework for the computer. He seemed to presuppose our age of distraction and the constantly connected workplace in two quotes:
“I have often said that the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for miseries, and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”
Without space, our priorities become muddled and distractions seduce us. When did you last take time to press pause and just think? The greater the noise, the greater the need for solitude.
So why do we spend so much energy fighting space? We don't like it.
Most of us understand the perils of too much noise and stimulation. But that doesn't necessarily compel us to do anything about it. Our brains become wired for noise; cutting it off can spur withdrawal symptoms. And those off-the-wagon cat video binges are not pretty.
Tim Wilson of the University of Virginia studied the degree to which people resist the solitude of their own thoughts.1 In the first round of tests, subjects struggled with just 6 to 15 minutes of quiet, cheating by picking up a device or book.
The next rounds were shocking. Literally.
Given his subjects' propensity for distraction, Wilson provided access to an uncomfortable one: a small electric jolt from a 9-volt battery. Two-thirds of the men resorted to shocking themselves rather than letting their minds wander (just a quarter of the women did, so you can draw your own conclusions from that).
Pascal was right: Men, in particular, don't like to sit quietly.
That's a tragedy. Wandering minds are linked to increased creativity and better working memory2—the part of our brains that can help process the noise and information that bombards us every day.
But even if we understand the need for more mental space, how do we find the discipline to create it?
In Praise of Contemplation
My family once unplugged for a month. No TV, movies, digital music, smartphones—nothing that wasn't required for school or work. At first, we went out of our minds.
Then our brains began to adapt. We rewired them for talking instead of texting, reading books instead of scanning social media feeds, hiking instead of watching TV.
I have never been so engaged in my life. Research cited by the Harvard Business Review explains why: “Recent studies are showing that taking time for silence restores the nervous system, helps sustain energy, and conditions our minds to be more adaptive and responsive to the complex environments in which so many of us now live, work, and lead,” write Justin Talbot-Zorn and Leigh Marz.3 Cultivating silence and letting our minds wander opens us to novel ideas and information.
Here are a few key areas you must intentionally practice to cultivate mental space. We'll call them the Three P's.
Pause. Mark Rampolla, the founder of ZICO Beverages, is a friend and a client. Mark did something most entrepreneurs only dream of—he created a new market. Today, coconut water seems ubiquitous, but Mark is the one who started it all. Coconut water is now an $8 billion industry, and his business was so successful that the Coca-Cola Company bought it. He cites the discipline of thought time as one of the biggest secrets behind his success.
Inspired by his father-in-law, a neuroscientist who devotes whole days to thought time, Mark tried for once a week to pause and think from 3 PM until the end of the day. No phone, Internet, or even books. Nothing but a piece of paper.
At first, thought time became nap time. But eventually this discipline spurred new ideas and solutions to business problems. Mark credits many of his successful ZICO decisions to the space he gave himself simply to think. (Bill Gates, by the way, will spend two weeks straight in thought time. Seems to have worked out for him.)
Focus doesn't happen in one sitting, and the time and method will vary from person to person. For me, it includes prayer and silence. Another good practice is called mindfulness—focusing your awareness on the present moment. (I like the Headspace app for this.) Whatever you call it, just 10 minutes a day has been shown to dramatically increase the ability for sustained focus.
Another key element of pausing is to mind the gaps. In the London Subway, there's a sign to remind you to step back so you don't get run over. Mentally, we need to step back and mind the gaps between the different events, roles, and spheres of our lives so we don't get run over by those as well.
This means planning your day so you're not dashing from event to event. The frustration of one meeting, for instance, can bleed into the next, depriving your mind of the time it needs to close and open again. Press pause for a few minutes between obligations, and give your mind the space it needs to reset.
We need the same kind of pauses at home. My wife used to let my kids open the garage door to greet me when I got home from work. Aside from the danger of a 2-year-old running up to my car, there was the issue of mental space.
Eventually, we agreed that Dad needed to sit behind the wheel to clear his head before he could be fully present for a rousing game of chase the 2-year-old. It's amazing what 2 minutes of clearing my head of the day's work and reminding myself to jump into the next sphere fully will do for my ability to be present with the people I love.
Prepare. Through preparation and visualization, Sun Tzu writes in The Art of War, battles are won before they're fought.
Take a few minutes at the start of the day to plan, then extend the habit to everything from meetings to presentations. I call this practice isolation before collaboration. It's amazing how much is wasted by people jumping into meetings without having done their own thought work prior.
For instance, preparing your thoughts and remarks before you jump into a meeting, conversation, or presentation can have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your words. People think great communicators are capable of effectively talking off the cuff. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, some nonverbal communication habits can make certain people more capable of capturing the attention of the room, but to be truly effective, ideas require space so you can structure them for maximize impact. A preacher friend I know practices his weekly sermon three times from the stage on which he'll give it. In the process, he refines and hones it down to a powerful message. Of course, the congregation assumes he's a “natural.”
Another good practice is to prepare your workday before diving in. In today's world, if you don't intentionally create space to prepare your day, you will be the raft rather than the sail. Even something as simple as reviewing your to-do list and prioritizing the top two to three tasks you absolutely have to get done today will help you realize a generous spike in productivity (more on this in Section 6).
Process. At the end of a project, a meeting, and the workday itself, we need time to pull back and ask: Why is this important, and what have I learned?
Researchers found that call-center employees who spent 15 minutes at the end of the day contemplating what they had learned performed 23 percent better after 10 days than colleagues who didn't reflect.4
Journaling is one way to do this. Sometimes I'll simply write “What I learned today” at the top of the screen and jot down a few bullets:
- A new slide would bring home point no. 3
- Need a survey of how many CEOs use lockout tools for vault time
- Frenchies actually make good pets (if I write it enough, it will be true)
Walls—both mental and physical—give us the space to be our best.