Failing to focus & write? It’s not your fault.

Why productivity hacks aren’t always the solution & how building resilience takes a community not just personal action.

I’m not the only person who has failed to implement seemingly rock-solid productivity advice. When everyone is successfully using the Pomodoro Method / Bullet Journal / Freedom App / latest trend, my failure feels personal.

I blame myself. I’m doing it wrong, I am a procrastinator, it’s my fault I can’t focus, plan, and make progress.

Why we love productivity hacks

Humans have this wonderful bias towards action. When we are presented with a problem, we seek to solve it.

There is an abundance of solutions out there - we might try something we did before that worked or take inspiration from others to try anew. The internet is full of science-backed solutions, which are offered generously, with personal testimony of their life-changing benefits, many of the solutions have been tried and tested over years, with research proving measurable impact.

It’s not to say the solutions are wrong. They often aren’t. They can work - for some of us, some of the time. But our bias towards action isn’t always helpful.

When the problem isn’t us

There is a key finding in social psychology called the ‘fundamental attribution error’. This is the tendency to overestimate individual factors and underestimate situational factors.

Take my failure to focus as a personal trait. Of course, sometimes I am lazy and procrastinate and I seek out easier, more fun and immediately rewarding tasks than writing. But that’s not always the case. Indeed, when I was writing our book Written, it was during the COVID-19 pandemic, the country was in lockdown, I had lost a lot of work and had severe finance pressures that were keeping me awake at night, then my father got ill and later died. I was stressed, traumatised and grieving. No number of Pomodoros was going to help me concentrate. Believing so was just cruel optimism.

It’s not just me

Working with writers and other creatives I come across this attribution error all the time. They are looking for solutions they can implement because they are desperate.

That is often the case when I work with academics, many of whom are evaluated on their publishing output yet are not provided with the support to enable them to write. For example, take a university I heard about that changed its offices over to open plan hot-desking - a brilliantly efficient way to manage desk space that also destroys the concentration needed to write.

All the academics in the office rushed to design their personal environment. They put up ‘do not disturb’ notices, booked focus time, turned off the internet, or plugged in noise-cancelling headphones. It’s a vision of the future where everyone is wearing an Isolator (read our past post: How to stop getting distracted) or working from home.¹

Yet the fundamental problem goes unsolved - these academics needed quiet places to write.

Behaviour change isn’t enough

Our bias for action can lead us leaping to conclusions, to rush to fix things at an individual level before we have figured out what is wrong at a structural level.

It might not be us that needs fixing.

Add in the fundamental attribution error and we end up believing we are at fault, which puts the responsibility on the individual to act when larger systems need to change. When our productivity fixes don’t work, we believe it is our fault. That’s before we get to the wider argument that it is easier and cheaper for individuals to implement personal productivity tips than it is to drive systemic change. After a university has invested in open plan offices are they really going to admit it was wrong and change it all back?

The argument of behaviour change is compelling. We like to think we have agency and are able to change. I believe we can change, we are able develop systems to support us to achieve our goals and dreams, but we can’t do it alone.

The solution is not the isolator but community

Last week we quoted the psychologist Angela Duckworth on how her concept of grit had changed over the years. She said that rather than gritty people being strongly individualistic they were more dependent on other people, not less. She said they were more likely to ask for help, “It’s very much about developing relationships, being vulnerable, saying what you can’t do, and then, with the support of other people, figuring out how to do it.”

When we were researching the resilience chapter of Written, this message came through again and again. Resilience is not an individual trait but an ecosystem. It’s not always your fault you can’t write - accepting that and being kind to yourself is the first step in making changes, at whatever level.

Keep going, Bec

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More on behaviour change

When Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by University of Chicago economist and Nobel Laureate Richard H. Thaler and Harvard Law School Professor Cass R. Sunstein, came out I was all over it. It felt so empowering.

But it’s not that simple. In fact it can be dangerous, as the brilliant and brutal take down by If Books Could Kill podcast argues. Listen to Part 1 and Part 2.

This paper ‘The i-Frame and the s-Frame: How Focusing on Individual-Level Solutions Has Led Behavioral Public Policy Astray’ by behavioural scientists Nick Chater and George Loewenstein provides an academic argument for why the focus on the individual (what they call the i-frame) deflects attention, resources and support from systemic change (the s-frame). They believe it has misled not just behavioural scientists but policy makes and politicians the world over, with dire consequences.

If you are after a more accessible book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari is exceptional - and dare I say - life changing.

I’d love to hear if you have read, watched or listened to anything that has helped you.

1. Home working is not option for everyone, indeed, many of the solutions offered only work if you have a certain amount of privilege, such as quiet space at home - something that is not an option if you are a young academic in a shared house or one with family and caring responsibilities.

I explored this a little when looking at the factors affecting PhD completion rates. Those with full-time jobs or who study part-time are more likely to drop out. For many, working while studying is not a choice but a financial imperative; those without money are set up to fail. When one UK university looked at barriers to doctoral education it found: ‘Financial factors, which restrict students’ educational choices, present one of the most challenging obstacles to accessing doctoral education.’ Bundled under non-financial factors, it found that women, Black British students, and those with disabilities experience persistent challenges which influenced PhD completion and their post-doctoral career progression. Quitting a PhD isn’t always a matter of personal choice.