Concentration and the absence of concentration

I love working at home. I do. Anyone still toiling in academe will see that lovely phrase 'working at home' and feel their heart rate slow down.

However. Some days you just know, from the beginning of the morning, that this is not going to be a good work day.

Two background facts before I go on: (1) my electricity meter is inside the house, and (2) many years ago I used to edit a magazine, at a time when I was a heavy smoker. I used to do the layout myself -- this is pre-desktop; we're talking galleys, cutting boards, razor blades and paste-up glue -- so I would spend one weekend in four sitting at the dining table designing and pasting up the 40-plus pages. I could sit there and work, without getting up or losing focus, for up to four hours at a time. When I gave up smoking, my concentration span shrank from four hours to 20 minutes and that is how it has stayed. Focusing and staying focused is about fifteen times as hard as it used to be.

So when you sit down to start the day's work and you are two minutes and one sentence into the thing you have to have finished by the end of the day and you hear bash bash bash rattle rattle rattle on the screen door, you just know it's a bad start to the day. Dude from the electricity, come to read the meter. Let him in, let him out, sit back down at the keyboard ...

Bash bash rattle rattle again. He's back. I appear in the hallway just in time to see him trying to open the screen door. (Why do men do this? Why do totally strange men think it is perfectly all right to open your screen door and walk into your house if you haven't appeared instantly to let them in? Women never do this.)

'This thing' (he held up an electronic doodah) 'says you've got another one in there.'
'Yes, it's the meter for the hot water service that blew up five years ago and I've had gas hot water ever since.'
'But I still have to get a reading for it.'
'Oh yes, I know.')

I flashed on the rest of the day, and I just know it's going to be punctuated by delivery men, neighbours, charity collectors, aggressive children from Optus or AGL or Foxtel trying to make me sign 20-page documents in zero point type on my doorstep in the fading light, cold calls from charity callers who will make me feel guilty or market researchers who will just make me feel irritated, and so-called "courtesy" calls (I wonder whether any of the callers understand that this term for their job is dripping with irony) that are in fact about attempting to part me from even more of my money.

In days gone by I would not have minded any of this. When one has focus by the bucketload one does not mind, indeed one welcomes, the occasional interruption. Mostly I'm thrilled to have liberated myself from nicotine, almost 20 years ago now, but aspiring quitters should not be fooled, for the downsides are very real. You will, indeed, stack on fifteen kilos overnight and you will never get rid of them. And you will, indeed, acquire the concentration span of a grasshopper and you'll never get rid of that either.