The Precarious Balance of Focus

I’m currently wedged into a chimney flue built in 1921, my left shoulder screaming against the soot-stained brickwork and a 500-lumen flashlight clamped between my teeth. It is a precarious, filthy, and strangely meditative position. In this narrow vertical world, balance is everything. One wrong shift and I’m falling or, worse, I’m stuck. Then, my phone vibrates in my pocket. It’s a rhythmic, buzzing intrusion that signals a text message. I know what it says before I even look. It’s likely a client or a contractor asking: ‘Hey João, got a sec for a quick question?’

I don’t. I never do. Because the moment I acknowledge that vibration, the mental map I’ve built of this 31-foot masonry structure begins to dissolve. My focus, which was tightly coiled around the structural integrity of the inner lining and the precarious state of a damper that hasn’t moved since the Nixon administration, suddenly shifts to the outside world. This is the myth of the quick question. It’s presented as a small, frictionless request-a social lubricant to get things moving. In reality, it is a high-velocity projectile aimed directly at the center of deep work. It’s a Trojan Horse that looks like a 1-minute favor but carries 21 minutes of recovery time in its belly.

The Price of Wreckage

We live in a culture that treats attention like an infinite resource, a tap we can turn on and off without consequence. If you are a knowledge worker, a writer, or a chimney inspector, your primary tool isn’t a keyboard or a brush; it’s your focus. When someone asks for a ‘quick second,’ they are asking to borrow your most expensive asset for free. They are assuming that your brain is like a Google search bar, capable of instantaneous results without any spin-up time. But the human brain doesn’t work that way. We aren’t solid-state drives; we are more like heavy steam engines. It takes time to get the pressure up, to get the pistons firing in sequence, to reach a state where the work feels like it’s flowing through us rather than being dragged out of us.

Mental Residue and Inefficient Burning

I’ve spent the last 21 years looking at chimneys, and the most common cause of a house fire isn’t a lightning strike or a freak accident. It’s the slow accumulation of creosote-the byproduct of inefficient burning. In the same way, the slow accumulation of ‘quick questions’ creates a layer of mental residue that prevents us from ever reaching a clean, hot, efficient burn in our work. We become perpetual starters and never finishers. We spend our days answering 51 emails and 11 Slack messages, only to realize at 5:00 PM that we haven’t actually built anything of substance. We have been busy, but we have not been productive.

The Assumption of Instant Resumption

There is a profound disrespect inherent in the ‘quick question.’ It implies that what you are doing is easily resumable. It suggests that your depth of focus is so shallow that a mere ripple won’t disturb the bottom. But the best work-the kind of work that solves the 1 problem no one else can figure out-requires you to go deep. It requires you to hold 31 different variables in your head at once, to see the connections between them, and to navigate the nuance of a complex system. When you are interrupted, those variables don’t stay suspended in the air. They crash to the ground. You have to pick them up, one by one, and figure out where they go all over again.

Shallow Breadth vs. Deep Quality

I once met a fellow inspector who prided himself on being ‘always reachable.’ He had 3 different phones… He was fast, sure, but he was shallow. His life was a series of 1-minute fragments, a mosaic of distractions that never formed a coherent picture. I realized then that I would rather be the guy who takes 4 hours to answer a text but finds the 1 flaw that saves a family from carbon monoxide poisoning. Speed is a terrible metric for quality.

The Availability Paradox

My Pinterest failure taught me a lot about the ‘just a sec’ mentality. I realized that my own willingness to be interrupted was a form of self-sabotage. I was giving people permission to break my concentration because I was afraid of appearing unhelpful. I wanted to be the ‘nice’ guy who always had an answer. But being nice is not the same as being effective. In fact, being too available often makes you less helpful in the long run, because you are never able to give anyone your full, undivided attention. You end up giving everyone a 21% version of yourself, which is a disservice to them and a disaster for you.

Guarding Cognitive Load

We need to stop apologizing for our absence and start valuing our presence. The next time someone approaches you with a ‘quick question,’ ask yourself if the 1 minute they are requesting is worth the 21 minutes of momentum you are about to lose. Usually, the answer is no. Usually, the question can wait. And if it can’t wait, it probably isn’t a ‘quick’ question anyway; it’s a crisis, and crises require even more focus, not less. We have to be the guardians of our own cognitive load. Because if we don’t protect our focus, no one else will.