May I hav ur attention. For 47 seconds plz!
One of mankind’s many infamous achievements is our growing inability to focus on anything in particular for more than a few minutes. More so online!
Dr. Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at University of California, who studies how digital media impacts our lives has been tracking, for decades, the decline of our ability to focus. Glad she didn’t lose focus on her research half way through!
She says our average attention on a screen was 2? minutes in 2004. A few years later, it had dropped to 75 seconds. Today, at best, we pay attention to one screen for an average of 47 seconds.
If you think this is scary, here is a finding that torpedoes whatever productivity that can be expected from us mankind. ‘When attention is diverted from an active work project, it also takes about 25 minutes to refocus on that task’ she says!
Wonder how?
‘If we look at work in terms of switching projects, as opposed to the micro view of switching screens, we find people spend about 10? minutes in any work project before being interrupted, internally or by someone else, and then switch to another work project,’ Mark says.
But don’t we go back to our original work, after flirting with other things?
Oh yes, we do. When we are interrupted on work two, we switch yet again to a different task. Call it work three!
And if you think this is bad, wait. Her research has shown we are also interrupted on work three, and move on to work four!
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And then there is a ‘switch cost’ too, says Gloria. A switch cost is the time it takes one to reorient back to their original work. You were distracted. You may have lost your thought. You need to think hard to figure out what you were thinking. This leads to increased stress and resultant inefficiency. All coz you flirted with other work!
If you think you are a multi-tasker and can breeze through multiple jobs at the same time, may I puncture your bubble. Enough researches and researchers have proved there is no such thing as multitasking. You cannot do two effortful things at the same time. Yes, you can talk and walk at the same time. But you can’t sing and run. Try and be prepared to be laughed at!
Dr. Gloria Mark says one can’t read email and be in a video meeting at the same time. When you focus on one, you lose the other. “You’re actually switching your attention quickly between the two. And when you switch your attention fast, it’s correlated with stress,’ she says.
Not to put too fine a point on the subject, the more people multitask, the more errors they make!
And who or what is the biggest culprit that causes it all?
Gloria blames the email. ‘Email is probably the worst because it’s become a symbol of work,’ she says. Her research has found a direct correlation between email and higher stress.
‘In an experiment, we cut off email for some workers for one week. Using heart rate monitors, we found that they became significantly less stressed and were able to focus significantly longer.’
Can you live without emails? At least for a week?
Product Consultant-Functional/T24 Functional Testing
2 年Nower days we started working on Negative pressure without any guidance, training and supporting documentation. Most ackward is and many stared following the same to juniors. More or less higher level of depression happens during year end appraisal, which will make an individual really he/she is not up to the mark. Determined person and who is having good mentor/Leader can be more successful in this digital world and obviously you can kill just 47secs ??