The cost of distraction and how to eliminate it when learning
Brent Newhall
21st Century Renaissance Man | Lead Instructor at Capital One | Passionate about education and learning
According to an interview with researcher Gloria Mark based on a study she conducted at UC Irvine, every distraction reduces productivity for an average of 23 minutes.
An average of 23 minutes!
Think about how often we're distracted (or, if we're honest, we distract ourselves) in a given day! We must spend almost all of our time in that reduced productivity zone.
This has a big implication for studying and learning. If every distraction during your study session drains your ability to study for nearly half an hour, you have to cut down distractions to practically zero.
How? The same way surgeons and pilots do it. Airline travel is the safest form of transportation partly because pilots follow checklists. Even if a pilot has flown every day for 30 years, he or she still follows a checklist for every flight.
I call this a Distraction Elimination Checklist. It lists every thing that tends to distract me and ensures that won't happen while I study.
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Here's my Distraction Elimination Checklist (though it'll be different for everybody):
- Get tea or water
- Go to the bathroom, if necessary
- Quit all desktop messaging apps like Slack and Discord, so messages won't pop up
- Shut off all cellphones, so the phone won't alert me
- Prepare a piece of paper for notes (writing on paper seems to improve brain functioning; it works for me)
- Take note of the time+25 minutes (this is when I'll consolidate my notes and take a quick break)
When I've completed this checklist, all of my personal distraction sources are handled. I'm ready to learn.
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Hope this helps! I'm Brent P. Newhall, I teach adults to code at the?Capital One Developers Academy, and I think a lot about how best to learn.