LAST YEAR a friend told me about a company called Hiut Denim, a small business based in Cardigan Bay in Wales, making jeans with workers and in a factory that a well-known chain store no longer wants.

They’re not the designer sort that come pre-washed and shrunk and distressed; instead, they arrive feeling like cardboard and you spend at least six months doing the hard work of breaking them in for yourself. I’ve a couple of pairs now, and they’re getting nicely shabby.

And to go with the denim, to keep in contact with customers (who, after all, won’t be buying more than one or two pairs a year), there’s a weekly e-mail newsletter called Scrapbook Chronicle.

It’s full of all sorts of interesting bits and pieces, including a regular column Do One Thing Well, which sums up the company philosophy.

Not long ago an item in it caught my attention, a link to a blog post about using time effectively.

The writer announced proudly that he’d taken to switching his smart phone into Airplane mode for half an hour or so at a time: no emails, no phone calls or text messages, no Twitter or Facebook notifications. So he’d get some work done, then reward himself with a flurry of message-checking before doing it all over again.

My first thought was: what a dafty. Can he really not frame himself to concentrate for more than five minutes on end? Does he have to look at every new message or posting immediately? Why can’t he wait till coffee time? Maybe he’s just got a lot of very insistent friends.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised he was making an important point. When you’re eating breakfast with the radio on in the corner while checking the BBC website at the same time, which are you really concentrating on?

The answer’s probably: none of them.

And I catch myself doing it: watching TV with half an eye while checking e-mail and Facebook and listening to my wife with half an ear.

Athletes and performers often talk about ‘flow’ or being ‘in the zone’ by which I think they mean a state of total concentration on what they’re doing. So deep into it that they’re completely immersed.

Sunk so far into the book you’re reading — or writing — that you don’t hear the doorbell when it rings.

It’s a state of mind that takes a while to reach, just like it takes a runner several minutes to warm up properly and hit his or her stride. It doesn’t flick on and off like a switch.

Yet each little ting from the phone or bleep from the computer scatters your attention so you have to start all over again.

More and more this year I’ve started to work in silence, with the phone off when I can. Listen to the silence — and it’s amazing what you can hear.