Is it just me, or does this sound familiar to you?
It’s something-a.m. and you’re still up & working away on the computer. But what on earth are you doing?
Somehow you’ve ended up on a random web page reading a random article about the breeding habits of wombats, which btw isn’t the topic of your article. Yet here you are.
It’s not only way past your bedtime, but you’ve been running on fumes for hours now, which is why you’ve drifted so far from shore. Your executive functions – those handy internal systems responsible for organizing, prioritizing, and generally adulting – shut down hours ago. At this point what you really need to do is stop, but you just can’t.
Why? You’re probably deep in hyperfocus – that state of flow that goes beyond merely finding your groove. In hyperfocus, you’re not merely immersed; you’re so immersed that you lose track of everything. You lose yourself, you lose any sense of time you might have, you forget to eat or even to pee, you stop hearing things like the phone ringing or your partner or kids standing right beside you talking to you.
In hyperfocus, every digression makes sense. The search becomes an end in itself, each new and shiny factoid giving you a tiny shot of dopamine, which encourages you to continue. That’s how the internet works.
It’s also how your brain works, even without the internet but with real books and especially when you’re out of spoons – tired, low on fuel, no impulse control left.
So now you’ve gone from watches to wombats and you have no idea how you got there or where to go next. Each link of the chain that led you here has its own internal logic, but the chain as a whole is gibberish.
Why oh why does this keep happening to me and what can I do about it?
First, why the hyperfocus? As I said: no spoons left.
Also: my brain is literally made for going down rabbit holes, with its bottomless curiosity, endless need for novelty, and absolute time blindness.
The very curiosity that makes me a lifelong learner also makes me not care whether the next link I follow is in fact relevant to the question I’m trying to answer. Each link I follow presents novelty – yay! dopamine! – and the promise of more novelty and interesting shiny things if I just keep on clicking.
As for time blindness, even if I can literally see the multiple clocks all over my office, I pay no attention to what time it is. Full disclosure: I even do time jumps. I notice the time at, say, 1:30 AM, and when I look up again a couple of minutes later, it’s 2:15. No idea what happened to the 44 minutes that actually elapsed while my brain thought it was one minute.
The compulsion to over-research is related, but different.
Personally, I over-research because I truly believe I can’t write about something until it makes sense to me. In fact, I believe I need to be an expert to be able to write with any “authority.”
So I keep researching. But when I do research when I’m already low on fuel, I get carried away, to the point where I get lost in the weeds. Do I stop when I realize this has happened? Of course not! My solution is to just keep at it, figuring I’ll make sense of it all in the morning when I’m fresh.
Sadly, the morning never brings any blinding epiphanies. My notes are still a hot mess and I still don’t understand enough to start writing.
What is to be done? The key to breaking the cycle of going down one rabbit hole after another is awareness and understanding, which opens the way to doing things differently.
- Reframe, question everything. I ask myself questions that start with, Is it true? Is it true that I need to be an “expert” so I can write with “authority”? Maybe “authority” is overrated. Maybe it’s an atavistic holdover of my long-ago academic training, where I learned to anticipate the counter-argument and destroy it before taking a stand of my own. Maybe it’s a trace of imposter syndrome, which I’ve struggled with but which has mostly settled down.
- Before I even approach the computer, I write down exactly what I’m looking for, with exact research questions and everything. On a sticky note, which I tack to my monitor where I’ll see it (and can promptly ignore it, but that’s another story for another day).
- Before I start, I try to remember to eat and hydrate, and if I’m all outta spoons for the day, I don’t even start.
- Set a timer. Set a timer. Set a timer. AND STICK TO IT. I actually hate this, though I rely on timers for my twice-monthly coworking groups. There’s always a “just one more minute” thing going on in my head when the timer goes off. I hate the interruption – but the interruption is, of course, the whole point. I have to force myself to actually stand up and walk away for a few minutes when the timer goes off, NO MATTER WHAT. (Note: I rarely invoke “discipline” or “willpower” or forcing anybody to do anything. This is one of the few exceptions.)
- The beginning of each “pom” (Pomodoro work session) is a really good time to check those research questions stuck to the monitor and see if I’m on track.
- I don’t even go near the computer in the evening. I know what happens, despite my best efforts, when I start something too interesting or absorbing after dinner. So unless I’m willing to stay up all night (which I sometimes do for website work), I do it in daylight.
All that said, it also helps to remember that research isn’t a one and done thing. The whole process is iterative: enough research to form an opinion, then some writing, then some more research to fill in the gaps, and then more writing.
And all that makes it possible to sidestep the rabbit holes and face fewer bleary mornings.
Coming up next: More on hyperfocus!
