Progress-focused

Several authors have advocated blocking time during you workday for working uninterruptedly. Amabile & Kramer (2011) say, on the basis of their research, that this is a condition for making progress in what is meaningful to you. Newport (2016) claims that working long and focused without interruptions leads to a dramatic increase in productivity and work satisfaction. Research by Sophie Leroy has shown that when you pick up a task again after an interruption there will be what she calls an attention residue. This means that part of your mental energy is still focused on what you were doing during the interruption. The interruption harms your deep focus.

Being able to concentrate and to keep concentrating is necessary when you are doing an important or difficult task. Doing such a task requires that you fully focus on that task and are not distracted or start mind wandering. When your mind wanders when you are doing a difficult task you must divide your attention between the task and the mind wandering. This means you are doing two things at the same time; you are multitasking. Research has shown that we are rather bad at multitasking. When we are mind wandering when doing a challenging task our performance will suffer. Such tasks require that we keep our focus on the task.