How to Pay Attention

Learning to code is hard work and I’m pretty sure that I’m a lot less exciting than your average YouTube star. So if I have to compete with YouTube (or with your friends on WhatsApp, Snapchat, WeChat, or whatever) for your attention then I’ll probably lose. And your computer and phone are designed to distract you because they are interested in engagement—they don’t care that you should be engaging with your studies, they want you to pick them up and use them. This is why you get so many notifications!

Evidence Base

There is plenty of evidence to back this up:

• Distractions make learning harder
• Nearly half of students distracted by technology
• The effect of cellphones on attention and learning…
• Distractions make retaining info harder
• The interrupted learner: how distractions during live and video lectures influence learning outcomes

Managing Distraction

So my recommendations for studying (online or offline) are:

• Turn off as many notifications as possible. On the Mac there is a ‘Do not disturb’ setting that you can enable in the Notifications section of your System Preferences. You can set it to turn on by time, and also add a setting short-cut to your ‘Notification Centre’ (upper-right corner of your desktop).
• Uninstall messaging apps that you cannot turn off. If quitting the app disables notifications then that’s fine. But if you can’t disable notifications then I’d suggest uninstalling the messaging app entirely. Facebook Messenger, for instance, is a massive memory-hog and usually available on the desktop UI anyway.
• Block access to distracting web sites. There are a number of tools that you can set up to block access to Facebook and other social media sites at set times of day. My Achilles heel is the news: if I’m struggling I tend to read news articles, so if I really need to make sure I don’t have the browser open to the home page of my favourite news sites.
• Use time-blocking. This is a well understood approach to managing your time as detailed, for example, here and used by many academics (who get even more email than you!).
• Work out a schedule. It’s a lot easier to avoid distractions if you have a routine that enables you to say “OK, I will work from 9–11 and then have a look at my email.” It is easier to be in control if you can give yourself rewards later. And if you get into a routine, as a parent probably suggested when you were an undergraduate (certainly mine did and I ignored them), then you’ll find that your ‘productivity’ improves dramatically. My mother was right, dammit.

The Problem of No Breaks

Frequent distraction is one problem, but (in a sense) getting enough distraction is another. As this piece suggests, it’s also important that you give yourself downtime between Zoom/Teams/whatever sessions. I will try to remember to bake these into our ‘lectures’, but you should also suggest breaks if you feel yourself flagging! This also applies, however, to your wider degree: Masters degrees are intense and you need to give yourself permission for a timeout… stepping away from the computer and going for a walk, doing some knitting, taking a weekend to visit another city or go on a camping trip, whatever floats your boat!