Are you handicapping your attention with task switching and moderate behavioural addiction? Most of us are, since smartphones entered our lives.
We live in the age of distraction and need to be far more intentional about where and when we focus our attention. Attention is currency, after all. It is what we are trading with each other as well as with all the apps and social media that are at our disposal.
We are always at risk of falling down the rabbit hole and completely getting waylaid, forgetting what we went there for in the first place, even if we just wanted to check the weather forecast on the internet.
So you want to get more done and reduce your hours?
Many of us are working longer and longer hours and much of this has more to do with distractions, causing us to task switch continuously throughout the day, than the actual amount of work we have to do.
When we task switch, there is a network cost in our brains according to Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success In A Connected World (Grand Central Publishing, 2016) and Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout (Portfolio, 2024).
“Humans don’t switch easily from one thing to another. When you start working on something new or hard it is usually tough for the first 15-minutes while your brain kicks into gear and gets into a groove,” said Newport, in a recent Huberman Lab podcast interview with neurobiologist, Dr Andrew Huberman.
If you don’t remove distractions from your devices or environment in those first 15- minutes, you are totally susceptible to having your attention grabbed by something else, and then you never get to complete what you had started. I’ve been monitoring myself, and it’s absolutely true!
The knock-on effect of constant distraction and task switching includes:
- Your working memory struggles to hold different bits of information you are working with and being able to refer back to them while solving for critical problems or creative solutions.
- Feelings of guilt and inadequacy surface.
- Getting angry with the clock or with other people.
- Incompletion of the important stuff, the deliverables, what you are paid for, or the part of your job that you actually get satisfaction from.
- Feeling like you are on a constant treadmill.
- Feeling exhausted with nothing to show for it.
- Loss of competence and confidence in your own ability.
- Missing deadlines.
- Producing poor quality work.
“There is no time in the day when you are more than 15 minutes away from a task switch,” says Newport. Isn’t that a sobering thought! I think for many people it’s closer to five minutes.
Causes of distractions:
- We have too many meetings for presenteeism sake.
- We are interrupted by notifications that force us to shift focus to something else while we are in the middle of something (email, Slack, Trello, Asana, social media and more).
- The median average in between checks is just five minutes – that’s a lot of task switching and it creates a confused cognitive space in our brains resulting in paying partial attention and reducing our cognitive output.
We have developed a fear of missing out – needing to be in the loop about everything, as well as needing to have our finger on the pulse of all the bad news and emergencies too.
So you want better focus and attention?
Who doesn’t want better focus and attention to up their productivity? If you want to do deep work, to get the really important stuff done, you need to set aside blocks of 60 – 90 minutes of uninterrupted time, otherwise you will just land up doing admin, answering emails and being distracted by notifications.
After looking more deeply into some of the neuroscience behind being more effective and focused, this is what I am doing now:
- Remove or quit distracting products and services from your laptop and phone.
- Disable notifications on your smart watch or put it in another room while you are working.
- Switch off your phone or put it on flight and focus mode.
- Close your door and tell colleagues or family not to disturb you until a certain time.
While apps and social media are useful they can also be detrimental to productivity and focus. They may be standing between you and getting that part of your job, that you actually love, done. At the same time you have increased anxiety and exhaustion from constant stimulation and task switching. It’s a no-win situation.
What are you actually paid to do, and are you getting to do it? I am paid by clients for insight and sense-making. This requires focused time spent reading, researching, interviewing, writing and creating frameworks for quality creative and critical thinking solutions.
You have moderate behavioural addiction
Understand that most apps and social media channels are designed to keep you online in their space because, the longer you stay, the more likely you are to use/buy the product or share your contact details.
Developers of social media, search engines and apps know have invested billions in brain research. They know just how to manipulate us by rewarding our behaviour for interacting with the app. When our brains release doses of dopamine (the feel good hormone) it makes us want to do things again and again.
Hence, we have moderate behavioural addiction, just like the Pavlov’s Dog experiement of so many years ago.
Tips to help you claim back your attention
- Be the boss of your brain and attention.
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- You need to command it to do your bidding. Attention without leadership is like a dog without a leash, it will just go sniffing around anywhere.
- Give your attention direction and boundaries. You may need to write down what you are going onto the internet to do before you even go there, in order to stay on track.
- Create 90-minute periods of notification- and distraction-free time to get deep work done. Do this just once a day and it will make a difference. Do it twice a day and it could revolutionise your life.
- Keep an attention diary for a month (or even just a week!) to track how the above actions boost your productivity, focus, the quality of your relationships and overall feelings of satisfaction. Note how many 90-minute sessions you managed in a day and how it made a difference.
Knowledge-worker burnout because of pseudo-productivity
We need to avoid knowledge-worker burnout as a result of pseudo-productivity and presenteeism.
Being able to demonstrate effort everywhere and anywhere, at any point in your day, on any device, doesn’t mean you are getting the important stuff done. Experiencing a healthy sense of fulfilment comes with deep work and completion not partial attention.
Both at an individual and organisational level we must start taking steps to curb pseudo-productivity. What are you going to do about it this week?
Have an empowered week.
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