Zelana Montminy once had a client who, when he finally looked up from his phone, found love. He was so absorbed in – or distracted by – his work that in his sessions with Montminy, he would often stop talking mid-sentence to check his phone. Montminy asked him to walk outside with her, and to put his phone in his pocket. His eyes darted around uneasily at the people on the busy sidewalk “as if he wasn’t sure what to make of the world”. But after this, while he waited at a crossing one morning, he said hello to the woman beside him. “Finally,” the woman said. “I’ve stood in this spot for two months and you’ve never looked up.”
伊拉娜·蒙蒂尼曾经有一个客户，当他终于抬起头来看手机时，他找到了爱情。他如此专注于——或者说被工作分心——以至于在与蒙蒂尼的会话中，他经常在句子中间停下来查看手机。蒙蒂尼让他和她一起出去散步，并把手机放在口袋里。他的目光不安地在繁忙的人行道上四处扫视，“好像他不确定如何理解这个世界”。但在这之后，一天早上他在路口等待时，他向旁边的女人打招呼。“终于了，”女人说。“我已经站在这里两个月了，你从未抬起头来看过。”
The anecdote serves Montminy’s purpose so well. She could have made it up, but she insists that not only did it happen, but her client and his fellow pedestrian went on to marry. Montminy is a behavioural scientist, author and speaker, whose recent corporate clients include American Express, Coca-Cola and Estée Lauder and whose portfolio of voluntary positions includes the Los Angeles Advisory Council of Common Sense Media. You don’t have to look further than the title of her new book to find the moral of this story: Finding Focus – Own Your Attention in an Age of Distraction.
轶事完美地服务于蒙蒂尼的目的。她本可以编造这个故事，但她坚持说，不仅这个故事发生了，她的客户和他的同行行人还继续结婚了。《蒙蒂尼》是一位行为科学家、作家和演讲家，她的最近的企业客户包括美国运通、可口可乐和雅诗兰黛，她的自愿职位包括洛杉矶《常识媒体》咨询委员会的成员。你只需看看她新书的书名，就能找到这个故事的主题：在分心的时代找到专注——掌握你的注意力。
The contention that underpins the book is that “our most valuable resource isn’t time. It’s attention” – if only we could take back control of where we place it. Montminy saw this in herself while researching the book, swapping in and out of the “many, many hats” of her own working week.
支撑这本书的观点是，“我们最宝贵的资源不是时间，而是注意力”——如果我们能收回我们放在哪里控制权。蒙蒂尼在研究这本书时看到了这一点，她在自己一周的工作中不断变换着“许多、许多帽子”。
“We are in a crisis of distraction,” she says. “We are constantly task-switching. Our attention has been hijacked in so many ways. And no matter how many hacks we’re doing, we are exhausted. But it’s not from doing too much. It’s from being everywhere and nowhere all at the same time.”
她说：“我们正处于分心的危机中。”。“我们不断地切换任务。”。“我们的注意力被以许多方式劫持。”。“无论我们做了多少技巧，我们都感到疲惫。”。“但这并不是因为我们做得太多。”。“而是因为我们无处不在，同时又无所不在。”
《‘我每天都会花一段时间在大自然中’，蒙蒂尼说。 照片：摩根·潘辛斯
We are talking on a video call. Montminy, who has three children, a labradoodle, and plenty of opportunity to test out her thoughts about task-switching in the laboratory of daily life, is parked at a mall in west Los Angeles, between an appointment and a meeting. She was at an event last night, then up at 6.20 this morning, and her youngest daughter did not want to leave the house for kindergarten, but Montminy looks fresh-faced rather than frazzled.
我们正在进行视频通话。蒙蒂尼有三个孩子，一只拉布拉多贵宾犬，还有许多机会在日常生活中测试她对任务切换的想法。她现在停在洛杉矶西部的购物中心，在预约和会议之间。昨晚她参加了一个活动，今天早上6:20就起床了，她最小的女儿不愿意离开家去幼儿园，但蒙蒂尼看起来精神饱满，而不是疲惫不堪。
The car is an apt setting, because Montminy was driving when she got the idea for the book – or realised that the book was personally necessary. She had stopped at a red light. “And I reached to look at my phone. It was a very busy work day and I yet again was trying to take on too much.” She was just congratulating herself on managing to send an email in this sliver of time when she became aware of her son calling from the back seat. “Mom! Mom! I’m talking to you!”
汽车是一个合适的背景，因为蒙蒂尼是在开车时得到写这本书的想法——或者意识到这本书对她个人来说是必要的。她在红灯前停下。“我伸手看手机。那是一个非常忙碌的工作日，我再次试图承担太多。”就在她为自己的成功发送了一封电子邮件而自我表扬时，她意识到她的儿子从后座叫她。“妈妈！ 妈妈 ！我在和你说话！”
She hadn’t heard a word he had said. “And I had this total epiphany. I thought: ‘I’m doing the very thing that I always say not to do, and that I don’t ever want [my children] to do.’”
她一个字也没听进去。“我有一种彻底的顿悟。我想：‘我正在做我一直说不要做的事情，而且我绝对不希望[我的孩子]去做。’”
Focus is a crowded field in publishing, so where does Montminy’s book, which Malcolm Gladwell’s book club has picked as a must-read, fit? She mentions Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow and the work of Sherry Turkle on the impact of digital distractions on relationships. Cal Newport advocates distraction-free focus in Deep Work – but, Montminy says: “It still broaches the productivity lane … I did not want to write another book about productivity.”
在出版界，专注力是一个竞争激烈的领域，那么 Montminy 的书，Malcolm Gladwell 的书友会选为必读书，它又该如何定位呢？她提到了 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 的心流概念和 Sherry Turkle 关于数字干扰对人际关系影响的研究。Cal Newport 在《深度工作》中提倡无干扰的专注力——但是，Montminy 说：“它仍然触及了生产力领域……我不想再写一本关于生产力的书。”
In fact, she thinks we have been getting focus all wrong. “Most people think of focus as something we have to do to get things done.” But this makes it all about output. “We have to think about it very differently. Focus,” she says, “is an act of emotional resilience. How do we claim our clarity and presence in a world that commodifies our attention? How do we decide what matters and then protect it?”
事实上，她认为我们对专注力的理解完全错了。“大多数人认为专注力是我们为了完成任务而必须做的事情。”但这使一切都变成了关于产出。她说：“我们必须非常不同地思考。专注力，”她说，“是一种情绪韧性的行为。我们如何在将我们的注意力商品化的世界中主张我们的清晰和在场？我们如何决定什么重要，然后保护它？”
What Montminy realised, in the car with her son, was that she had fallen into a familiar trap. “I was wearing productivity as a badge of honour.”
蒙蒂尼在车里意识到，自己陷入了熟悉的陷阱。“我把生产力当作了一种荣誉的标志。”
She has always been good at multitasking. And looking at success in terms of outputs and rewards is “just culturally how I was raised”, she says. “My parents and my sister were born in the Soviet Union [in Moldova] and immigrated [to the US] in the 70s. I’m first generation. And with that comes expectation, adjustment.”
她一直擅长多任务处理。她说，从产出和回报的角度来看待成功，“这只是我成长的文化背景”。“我的父母和姐姐出生在苏联[摩尔多瓦]，70年代移民到了美国。我是第一代。这就带来了期望和调整。”
What’s different now is that “in this time that we’re in culturally, everyone has normalised burnout in a way that I think is really dangerous”. We kid ourselves that we are resting when really we are merely distracted. “A distraction is something you do to escape the present moment. Resting is a return to presence. Both involve stepping away – but only one of them is restorative.”
现在不同之处在于，“在这个文化时期，每个人都以一种我认为非常危险的方式将过度劳累正常化”。我们自欺欺人地认为我们在休息，而实际上我们只是在分心。“分心是为了逃避当下而做的事情。休息是回到当下。两者都涉及离开，但只有一个是恢复性的。”
蒙蒂尼和她的幼女在五月的 Cleobella 母亲节茶会上。 照片：Stefanie Keenan/为 Cleobella 拍摄的 Getty Images
While her previous book, 21 Days to Resilience, offered something of a quick fix, Finding Focus is a guidebook to meaningful and lasting change. Montminy herself has transformed the way she lives, and over the past few years has disavowed multitasking and no longer believes in what she calls “the myth of balance”. Rather, she says, there are “seasons”, in which different elements of life – family, work, voluntary roles – require more attention. She normally lives in the affluent Pacific Palisades suburb of Los Angeles, and is quick to point out that she is able to “outsource … accepting help with household cleaning, occasional childcare, and sometimes driving. I used to want to do it all, to be everything to everyone. But that was draining and unsustainable, and it left me scattered instead of present. I’ve had to learn to accept help from family, friends and others, and I don’t want to pretend it’s all me because that only reinforces, especially for women, the false idea that we should shoulder every layer of household and family life alone.”
虽然她的上一本书《21天培养韧性》提供了一种快速解决问题的方法，但《找到专注》是一本关于有意义且持久变化的指南。蒙蒂尼本人已经改变了她的生活方式，在过去的几年里，她放弃了多任务处理，不再相信她所说的“平衡神话”。相反，她说，生活中有“季节”，在这个季节里，生活的不同方面——家庭、工作、志愿角色——需要更多的关注。她通常住在洛杉矶富裕的太平洋帕利塞兹郊区，她很快指出，她能够“外包……接受家务清洁、偶尔的儿童看护，有时开车。我以前想要做所有的事情，成为对每个人来说都是一切。但那很消耗精力且不可持续，它让我变得分散而不是专注。我不得不学会接受家人、朋友和其他人的帮助，我不想假装这一切都是我自己的，因为这只会加强，尤其是对女性来说，我们应该独自承担家庭和生活的每一层面的错误观念。”
I can’t help noticing that Montminy’s gaze keeps lowering to the passenger seat beside her while she talks. Is she multitasking?
我忍不住注意到，当 Montminy 在说话时，她的目光不断降低，看向她旁边的乘客座位。她是不是在分心做其他事情？
“So you saw my attention go? For a moment, right?” she says. There are ants in the car! And while technically they require Montminy to multitask, the ants are a low cognitive demand, and actually, a “glimmer” – a little bit of connection and joy in the day, while she sits there musing. “What a funny life to live in a car. I have trained myself to hold on to those moments,” she says. “How do we build out a tiny, tiny stitch of time within whatever we’re doing to feel that?”
“所以你看到我的注意力转移了吗？就一瞬间，对吧？”她说。车里居然有蚂蚁！虽然技术上它们需要蒙蒂尼进行多任务处理，但这些蚂蚁的认知需求很低，实际上，它们带来了一丝“闪光”——在她沉思时，一天中的一点联系和快乐。“住在车里真是一种有趣的生活。我已经训练自己抓住那些时刻，”她说。“我们如何在所做的事情中构建出一点、一点的时间，去感受那种感觉呢？”
The smallness of that “tiny stitch of time” sounds poignant, but Montminy says: “This is why I’m so passionate about focus and attention, because when we notice the small stuff, when we’re focused enough to attune to those moments, that is what makes up a life.”
那个“微小的时间缝隙”的渺小听起来很感人，但蒙蒂尼说：“这就是我为什么如此热爱专注和注意力的原因，因为当我们注意到这些小事，当我们足够专注去调整到这些时刻时，这就是构成生活的东西。”
After she had finished writing the book, but before it was due to be published, Montminy’s cherished paths, routines and community were subject to a horribly literal burnout: the Palisades wildfire earlier this year. Thirty-one people died and “there was a colossal loss of infrastructure. The whole community was levelled. My children’s schools, dance studios, dentists, every single sidewalk that they walked and loved.”
在她完成书写但尚未出版之前，蒙蒂尼珍视的路径、习惯和社区遭受了一场可怕的直接性燃尽：今年早些时候的帕利塞兹野火 。三十一人死亡，”基础设施损失巨大。整个社区都被夷为平地。我孩子的学校、舞蹈工作室、牙医，他们走过的每一条他们所爱的街道。”
Montminy’s house was left standing – but everything inside was ruined. Like many others, she and her husband, an investment banker, and their children, are now staying in another part of the city, though they hope to return in a few months. “We lost not just the physical community, but the community itself,” she says. “I wake up some mornings and think it’s all still a dream.”
蒙蒂尼的房子幸存了下来——但里面的一切都被毁了。像许多人一样，她和她的丈夫，一位投资银行家，以及他们的孩子们，现在住在城市的另一部分，尽管他们希望几个月后回来。“我们失去的不仅仅是物理社区，还有社区本身，”她说。“有些早晨醒来，我觉得这一切都像是一场梦。”
Montminy delayed publication, and while she didn’t rewrite Finding Focus, she felt herself, in the aftermath of the fire, rewritten by it – “rearranged by grief”.
蒙蒂尼推迟了出版，虽然她没有重写《找到焦点》，但在火灾之后，她感觉自己被它重新书写了——“悲伤重新排列了她”。
“We’re grieving every day as human beings. We grieve ideas of what we thought would happen. We grieve a simpler life. We grieve expectations. We grieve for people and relationships that don’t show up in the way we wanted. We push all that grief down and away. We don’t want to deal with it. And so we distract ourselves. It’s our pacifier.”
我们每天都在为人类而哀悼。我们哀悼那些我们认为会发生的事情的想法。我们哀悼简单的生活。我们哀悼期望。我们哀悼那些没有以我们想要的方式出现的人和关系。我们把所有的悲伤都推下去，远离。我们不想处理它。所以我们分散自己的注意力。这就是我们的安抚物。
蒙蒂尼的房屋是今年 1 月洛杉矶帕利塞兹和伊顿火灾中众多受灾房屋之一。 照片：马里奥·塔马/盖蒂图片社
Montminy has a gift for practicality, for saying things that make perfect sense in a way that makes you happy to believe you were already thinking them. Some of her recommendations – such as time-blocking – are familiar, but her own daily mental health workout, her effort to choose where to focus, has brought a deeper shift, the feeling that she is engaged in “a daily act of defiance”.
蒙蒂尼擅长实用性，她能够用让人愉快的方式说出让你觉得完全有道理的话。她的一些建议——比如时间块——很熟悉，但她自己的日常心理健康锻炼，她努力选择专注的地方，带来了一种更深刻的转变，感觉她正在进行“每日的反抗行为”。
It begins when she wakes up and refuses to check her phone first thing – “because that primes your brain for distraction”. She keeps a pad on her desk, “which visually is super-calming”, where she writes anything that comes to mind. “And when I dump it, I can sort of let it go. I clear the mental clutter which frees my working memory for the things I need to get done.”
她醒来后拒绝首先查看手机——“因为这会让你的大脑准备好分心”。她在桌子上放了一块便签，“视觉上非常舒缓”，在那里写下任何进入脑海的东西。“当我把东西写下来后，我似乎就能放手。我清理了心理上的杂乱，这让我可以腾出工作记忆来处理需要完成的事情。”
She creates “micro-pauses” in her day. “Even driving without music for 10 minutes is like a daily meditation.” She has at least one phone-free ritual – no phones at dinner, for instance – and tries “to be in nature for a certain chunk of time every day”.
她为自己的日常生活创造“微暂停”。即使是“10分钟内不开音乐开车”也像是一场日常冥想。她至少有一个无手机的仪式——比如晚餐时不使用手机——并且“每天尽量花一段时间在大自然中”。
One of the hardest elements of her mental fitness regime has been “building up my boredom tolerance, trying to let myself be idle without filling the gap”. She has had to start small – looking out of a window for five seconds, then trying to last a bit longer. Think of it as like building your number of reps in the gym. “I might look up from my desk as a break, and just stare and be present with my thoughts. It’s shocking to me how rare that is.”
她在精神健康训练中最困难的部分之一是“提高我的无聊忍耐力，尝试让自己空闲而不去填补空白”。她不得不从小事做起——向窗外看五秒钟，然后尝试坚持更长时间。把它想象成在健身房里增加你的重复次数。“我可能会从桌子上抬头休息一下，只是凝视并沉浸在我的思绪中。对我来说，这很令人震惊，因为这种情况是多么罕见。”
The aim, she says, is “to arrive every day with more clarity, more agency. If we can sit with those important feelings and work through them, [we can] come out on the other side with growth and learning and strength and resilience.”
她的目标是“每天都能更加清晰、更有行动力。如果我们能和那些重要的感受坐下来，处理它们，[我们就能]在另一边收获成长、学习、力量和韧性。”
