[The Probe, May 2025]
As a species we’re becoming increasingly exposed to distractions. There are all the obvious digital interruptions we respond to including alerts, messages, emails, alarms and phone calls. Then there is the fateful and mindless doom-scrolling where you might go online for a specific reason and end up losing literally hours as one link leads to another with a cunning magnetism. I know someone who puts their time-wasting apps in one folder, out of sight on their phone, entitled “Life loss” as a reminder to enter the folder at their peril! There is a point to understanding more about this though – some diversions are really valuable, it’s just a question of knowing which ones.
In his great book ‘Feel Good Productivity’ Dr Ali Abdaal states that “By adding a side quest to your day, you create space for curiosity, exploration and playfulness – and could discover something amazing and totally unexpected along the way.” He is an advocate of introducing levity and fun to your daily work (maybe not actually while you are in surgery) and encourages us to explore side quests as a way to enrich our thinking and learning.
It makes good sense and the difference between useful diversions and time-wasting distractions lies in three words – purpose, scope and impact. Your deviation from the task in hand is fully warranted and rubber-stamped if it is a planned, temporary detour that will enhance or improve your original task.
I often think about this when I’m stumbling through something the long-winded way in any software programme (most of them in fact), knowing very well that if I take ten minutes out of my day to learn the easy, intended route by watching a tutorial, it will save me time and avoid frustration when I encounter the issue again. The danger is of course that once I have satisfied my need to know how to do something, what’s to stop me wandering down the cleverly constructed maze of Google’s well-planned algorithms? Several hours later…
Being curious is a lifeline, it keeps us engaged, interested and feeds our main goals. ‘What would happen if…’; ‘Why don’t we do things like this?’; ‘How does this action affect that one?’ and so on until we satisfy the interest, discover something new or just abandon our line of enquiry as a dead-end. All of our ponderings and findings contribute to something bigger. Until they don’t. If you’re not getting something productive from your diversions, you’re probably in a rabbit hole. Curiosity and dopamine are good friends. Doom-scrolling and low mood, I suspect, are also mates.
A good quality side quest should be planned – or at least examined – before you leap in. By going off on a thoughtful tangent you don’t know what you might discover. You might grasp the tantalising strands of a fantastic new endodontic approach to be explored and researched further. Or you might just learn how to set up your spreadsheet properly. Either way, using a side quest to feed your curiosity, learn something new, or support your main objectives in some way is something to be celebrated and pursued daily.
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