In 1781, German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously locked himself inside his house so he could finish the "Critique of Pure Reason" without getting distracted by the outside world. And he Kant even blame TikTok (…I… am so sorry about that, it was right there).

It certainly hasn’t gotten any easier to focus since 1781. Sometimes I pick up my phone to look for an email and 90 minutes later, I come to, scrolling on TikTok and I don’t even know how that happened.

Thankfully, those social media time warps don’t happen quite as often as they used to, but that’s only because I decided to become very curious about my distractibility.

It takes so much work to stay focused, and despite how much I want to blame it on my ADHD, it’s actually just my brain doing what it’s designed to do.

Wired to Wander

Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert conducted a study in which they found that the average person spends around 47% of every waking hour in a state of mind wandering, or what neuroscientists call the brain’s “default mode network.” We are wired for mind wandering!

We time travel into the past and the future so often that we usually don’t even realize it. It’s not until we have to answer emails, clean the house, and finally decide to commit to a meditation practice that we really notice how much work it takes to focus and settle. Our brains are very noisy places.

The mind wandering turns out to be an evolutionary behavior that served us when we needed to be on high alert for threats to survival. Now, that same internal mechanism that helped us scan for getting eaten by a bear is what makes us predisposed to fall down a TikTok scroll hole for 90 minutes.

But modern life needs us to use our focus and attention much differently than our prehistoric ancestors. While most of us would probably rather be effortlessly checking off to-do’s than anxiously overthinking how distracted we feel, it’s been helpful for me to accept that focus takes work.

Focusing on something is not as simple as flipping on a switch when you decide it’s time to work.

I’ve found that creating a focused state has more to do with environment than willpower. Here are the 3 key conditions that need to be in place for me to be able to get into a focused state:

Condition #1: I need to be in a place mentally and physically where it is safe to let my body relax.

I can’t do good work if I’m wound up and scattered. I need to be able to mentally and physically settle down. This is also known as regulating your nervous system. So, the goal of condition #1 is to become so unbelievably patient with myself that I can focus on single task at a time, a single person in front of me, a single moment long enough to experience what it offers me.

My work is to stay with things long enough to sink my teeth into them. But, in order to do that, I have to feeling like I can relax long enough to become present with what’s in front of me.

Condition #2: My phone must be out of sight, and distractions minimized as much as possible.

I am hopeless without this condition being met.

Condition #3: If I want to do good work, I must let myself dilly dally.

I mean it. I used to spend all day anxiously tangled up like a jewelry knot because I was so hard on myself about how distracted I was. The whole thing was exhausting and I was doing that part to myself! So, I decided that now, I dilly dally.

Generally, I work in 1-2 hr blocks of time, but during the first 15 minutes, I don’t really focus on the task. I dilly dally. I don’t force it — it’s a calibration period.

I find that if I allow for some dilly dallying, my desire to settle into the task comes to me pretty predictably within the first 15-20 minutes. Now, I don’t make the rules, but I’ve done this over 3,000 times and it’s generally goes like this:

• I decide on the task and that I’ll spend an hour on it

• I start my countdown timer and begin to feel a lottttt of resistance

• I release myself from the pressure of maximizing all 60 minutes, and give myself time to check my email, check Instagram, decide maybe I do want a cup of tea, and by the time I’ve gotten all my wiggles out, it’s about 15 minutes into the hour and I’m ready to do the thing. All because I allowed the dilly dally.

It could just be me, but I think it’s worth giving yourself permission to dilly dally and not feel bad about it. You’d be doing it anyway, but just judging yourself the whole time.

If you’re still assuming that being fully immersed in a task or project should happen as soon as you set your mind to it, do yourself a favor and scrap that idea. Think about it instead as creating an environment in which you can align with a focused state through staying with things and becoming more present where you are.