In her autobiography Through the Narrow Gate, scholar and former nun Karen Armstrong recounts finding a fellow novice in fits of laughter. She was pointing at a notice in the boot room and shrieking. Peering at the wall, Armstrong discovered minute directions on how to clean a shoe: “take it up in your left hand, cover liberally with polish, brush off and shine with a soft cloth”. Perplexed, she then spotted the punchline: “Repeat for the other shoe.” Her colleague, still helpless, added: “Can you imagine! If Mother hadn’t had that last sentence printed, all the novices would be walking round with one shoe perpetually clean and one dirty!”
Of course, in this context, the instructions are all about conformity. But could such detailed directions also be helpful beyond the convent? In The Checklist Manifesto, surgeon Atul Gawande celebrates the precision of checklists: “They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations.” They’re also useful in seemingly straightforward situations.
As an autistic person who probably also has ADHD, my executive function or working memory gets easily overloaded. The menopause really hasn’t helped, either. I’m generally OK when I’m working in a room on my own, but any interruption quickly makes me forget what I was doing — especially when it’s a complex or unfamiliar task. Creating a detailed checklist or work breakdown in advance helps me recover from inevitable disruptions. Exasperatingly, those disruptions sometimes originate in my monkey brain, so I even can’t blame anyone else. As Gawande writes, “We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail.”
On a bad day, I also feel overwhelmed by simple tasks, such as planning an overnight trip. I’ve found the goblin.tools website invaluable for breaking it down into steps that I can tick off. You can adjust the “spiciness” level to get the right amount of detail. The goblins will gladly assist you with much bigger challenges, too, such as moving to another country (although they won’t do your packing for you).
Writing is another activity where I often struggle with focus. Well, I struggle much less these days, having expended so much effort on establishing an effective process. One of my current favourite tools is Focusbox, a web-based app that helps you timebox your tasks. Originating in the software development world, timeboxing is a technique for allocating a fixed amount of time for an activity in advance. Once the time is up, you assess whether you’ve reached your planned goals. It’s like setting a budget, then checking whether that was realistic when you get your credit card statement. I find this approach helpful because it encourages me to:
- Break an intimidating task — such as writing a chapter — into smaller chunks. These chunks might include: summarising a text I’m critiquing, defining a concept, or revising a paragraph.
- Consider how much time that chunk is “worth”. Should I really spend two hours revising that paragraph? Or am I just avoiding engaging with that crunchy book?
- Organise my writing into separate sessions. Rather than keeping going until I think that I’ve done “enough” — by which time I’m tired and grumpy — I’ve planned exactly what I’m doing to do. Once it’s done, I stop. Because there’s a simple plan, I know exactly where to resume when I return to my desk.
I’ve tried other apps that constantly urged me to share my progress on social media, or, heaven forbid, chat with other users between tasks. Many of these apps are actually contributing to the distractions, rather than improving focus. Focusbox is perhaps less slick than some of its competitors, but this simplicity is soothing. You can even play relaxing backing tracks as you work.
As Gawande notes, apparently simple problems can overwhelm us, hampering our ability to handle bigger challenges. Unlike him, most of us aren’t saving lives, but we can still benefit from clear structure and a deliberate process. Rather than just working harder to combat the distractions, we can make it easier for ourselves with a checklist. Channel your inner Mother Superior and you’ll always have shiny shoes.