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Productivity|Reading Time: 2 minutes

The High Cost of Distractions

We tend to think that other people get distracted but not us. We’re different. We’re better than average. We can do more than one thing at a time and still be amazing.

Not so.

The always-on world of 24/7 bits and bytes is leaving an impact. While we cling to the illusion that we’re more productive, in reality, we’re not. Distractions eat time. And more importantly they create an environment where we shallow think.

Here is an excerpt from Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long, where author David Rock discusses this in more detail.

Distractions are everywhere. And with the always-on technologies of today, they take a heavy toll on productivity. One study found that office distractions eat an average 2.1 hours a day. Another study, published in October 2005, found that employees spent an average of 11 minutes on a project before being distracted. After an interruption it takes them 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they do at all. People switch activities every three minutes, either making a call, speaking with someone in their cubicle, or working on a document.

But that’s not all. Distractions are impacting our ability to focus. And focus is how we use second-order thinking. Rock writes:

Distractions are not just frustrating; they can be exhausting. By the time you get back to where you were, your ability to stay focused goes down even further as you have even less glucose available now. Change focus ten times an hour (one study showed people in offices did so as much as 20 times an hour), and your productive thinking time is only a fraction of what’s possible. Less energy equals less capacity to understand, decide, recall, memorize, and inhibit. The result could be mistakes on important tasks. Or distractions can cause you to forget good ideas and lose valuable insights. Having a great idea and not being able to remember it can be frustrating, like an itch you can’t scratch, yet another distraction to manage.

Maybe open-plan offices are not such a good idea after all. Not only do we do more work, but we do our best work when we’re distraction free.

***

If you enjoyed this article you’ll also like:

In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed — This article explores our cultural desire for speed and its consequences. Slow, it turns out, is the best way to increase understanding and avoid problems.

How to Survive in an Open Office — The author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain, offers advice on how to survive in an open office.

 

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