FSB Author Article
Taming Distraction and Finding Focus in an
Overloaded World
Adapted from Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the
Coming Dark Age
By Maggie Jackson
"Wisdom is the art of knowing what to overlook," wrote William James, the father of American psychology research. In a nutshell, he captured the foremost challenge of our time: how to allocate our attention.
Today, we try to pay attention in six different directions -- at once. Multitasking has become a national pastime. Continuous partial attention is the norm. We eat and text while driving, zip through email on conference calls, and listen with half an ear to our spouse, the tv and our racing mind. Full frontal focus is a scarce commodity, an endangered species. Consider that:
-- we prize knowledge work, but a third of workers are so busy that they often have no time to reflect on the work they do.
-- we contact millions of people across the globe, but have trouble sitting down to dinner with the ones we love.
-- we can tap into millions of info-bits -- 50 million websites, 75 million blogs, 1.8 million books in print -- yet we increasingly seek knowledge in what’s first-up on Google.
Should we blame the Blackberry? No. Our hyper-mobile, split-focus, cybercentric lives didn't begin with the cell phone, computer and pda. Rather, the first high-tech revolution more than a century ago sparked new experiences of time and space -- that are intensifying today. Inventions such as the telegraph, cinema, railroad, and airplane shattered distance and upended ancient rhythms of time. We've been building toward an age of speed and overload for generations.
Now attention is scattered and broken throughout the day. Informatics professor Gloria Mark, a leader in the new field of "interruption science," reports that the average knowledge worker switches tasks every three minutes. And once distracted, a worker takes nearly half an hour to resume their original task, according to Mark, a professor at the University of California/Irvine. Interruptions now consume 28 percent of a worker's day, costing U.S. businesses $650 billion annually, estimates the business research firm Basex.
The problem isn't just informational, it's relational. Our technologies are expanding our social networks enormously. When sociologist Danah Boyd sifted through the five-year email archive of one young worker named Mike, she found that he was connected to 11.6 million people worldwide. Yet this hyper-connectivity often squeezes out time for rich, complex interactions, studies show. Again, we are left with a steady diet of diffused attention, not deep focus.
The costs to living distracted
are mounting:
Employees dogged by interruptions and lacking time to focus are more apt to feel frustrated and stressed, and more prone to angry outbursts, according to the Families and Work Institute.
Time-pressured workers don't produce creative work on days when they feel scattered and interrupted, concludes a study published in the Harvard Business Review. Instead, times of focus produce innovation.
Split-focus undermines our relationships. In meetings where everyone's checking email, opportunities for collective "creative energy and critical thinking" are lost, observes Intel principal engineer Nathan Zeldes, a pioneering thinker on combating “"info-mania."
Multitasking may inhibit deep learning, a UCLA study reports. People studying a task while multitasking are less able to transfer their knowledge to new challenges, says co-author Barbara Knowlton. This may be because multitaskers activate parts of the brain linked to automatic behavior, while focused students use the hippocampus, a region central to deep learning, the study found.
What can we do? Finding focus is both a matter of harnessing our inner resources, i.e. our ability to pay attention, and creating a climate that’s at least sometimes free of distraction. The good news: some pioneering employers and researchers are showing how this can be done.
Speaking a "language of attention" is a first step. Once an enigma, human attention is being mapped, tracked and decoded by neuroscientists who now consider attention to be a trio of skills consisting of focus, awareness, and executive attention, i.e. planning and decision-making. Like different arrows in our cognitive quiver, these skills work in various ways to help us alternately stay tuned to our environment or focus on our goals. Attention is the key to thriving in a complex, high-tech environment.
And there's more good news: evidence is mounting that attention can be taught. Scientists are boosting children's attentional skills via computer exercises and behavioral therapies. As well, as little as thirty minutes a day of meditative practices can strengthen attention. "That is powerful," says Amishi Jha, a University of Pennsylvania scientist who studies meditation’s effects on attentional prowess.
Creating spaces where focus can blossom is equally crucial if we are to cultivate a renaissance of attention. That's why pioneering employers are creating "white spaces" -- unwired rooms at the office or times on the calendar for uninterrupted, agenda-free thought. In 2005, IBM software engineers began avoiding meetings and even calls or emails on Fridays so they could concentrate on creative inventing. Now "Think Fridays" are observed worldwide.
We can dial back our climate of distraction, as well, by practicing message restraint. The average worker gets 156 messages a day, according to the Radicati research group, along with a steady stream of instant-messages, phone calls, faxes and snail mail. But we worsen the influx by sending unnecessary or unclear communications, or by duplicating messages in multiple media, says Jonathan Spira, chief executive officer of Basex. "We need to get across to people how the actions that they take can impact hundreds of people," says Spira.
Fast forward 50 years. Will attention be taught in pre-school as a first building block of 21st-century learning? Will employers give customized training in decision-making or awareness? Can we become attentional athletes through a daily dose of focus-sharpening cognitive calisthenics? Attention gives us the ability to thrive -- not just survive -- in a world of mobility, speed, connectivity and overload. More than ever, we can’t afford to let distraction become the marker of our time.
©2008 Maggie JacksonAuthor Bio
Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist who writes the
popular "Balancing Ads" column in the Boston Globe. Her work also has
appeared on National Public Radio and in the New York Times, among
other national publications. Her acclaimed first book, What's Happening
to Home? Balancing Work, Life, and Refuge in the Information Age,
examined the loss of home as a refuge. Her new book, Distracted:
The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, is currently
available from Prometheus Books.