Should we be more distracted?

WHY WE JUST CAN’T RESIST DISTRACTIONS

Go to the self-improvement section of any bookstore and I wager you will find a book that imploring you to achieve more by limiting distractions.??You, like me, may be able to remember a teacher who either told you to "pay attention" or wrote something similar in your school report. We're told "focus" is the key to productivity and "be less distracted". So why do we find distractions so irresistible and is there any benefit to being distracted?

HANDS UP IF YOU'D LIKE TO CREATE MORE TIME IN YOUR DAY!

Covid and lockdown has teased even the most reluctant technophobes into the wonderful world of zoom, gmeet and teams.??Families and friends endlessly innovated virtual get togethers and our business lives quickly adapted to “let’s have a quick Teams call”.?These days a suggestion of a teleconference feels from another era such is the progress over the past two years.

Hands up every parent out there who remembers or is currently raising a toddler??It’s a tough period in life.??My son is growing up fast but I still seem adept at inviting technology toddlers into my life. Every device I own or app I install has its own inbuilt toddler. Collectively they tug at me throughout the day begging for my attention, trying to convince me to love them more or guilt me into thinking if I don't respond I'll hurt their feelings.

Have you noticed as well how they get increasingly noisy they get. Seriously I had an email from a company who failed to send me anything during lockdown who sent five mails in succession eventually entitled "Ian, we're all sad to think you don't love us any longer". The noise increases until you relent and switch focus.

Notifications pop-up constantly whether on my phone, tablet, watch, laptop screen all wanting my attention.?Messages from colleagues appear along with the tempting little toaster peeks embedded in outlook that just tease you with “Important message from big boss” that’s almost impossible to resist.?It’ll only take a minute.?Or so you think.??But you’d be wrong.

THE TRUE TIME-COST OF DISTRACTIONS

When we are distracted by these messages, the impact is not just in switching to read the email.??A study by Gloria Mark at University of California looked at how our brains cope when we are distracted between tasks.?Her study found that although typically we’re able to return back to our original task and complete it without an impact on quality this creates a cognitive load on our brains.?

In other words to recover from the two minute quick read of that email it may take us a whopping 25 minutes of additional brain-effort to recover our flow.??It's particularly acute when we're in the depth of a creative or deep thinking task. Have you ever noticed that even though you've said to the person interrupting "not right now", when you switch back to task you have no clue where you stopped? This is the interruption effect at work.

Of course the work still needs to get done. We compensate by either working longer hours to recover or by putting more stress on our brains where that exhaustion impacts other tasks later in the day.?Sooner or later it all catches up with you whether that’s at work or more frequently when we switch back to home-life in the evening.

How many of you when you were a kid at school ever had a school report to the effect of Ian would be completely awesome if only he could focus more and BE LESS DISTRACTED.?Positioned this way in countless school reports the choices are laid out before us – focus vs distraction, awesomeness vs well whatever the opposite of awesomeness is.

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO RESIST DISTRACTIONS?

So why is it so much harder to do than to say??Neuroscience and our very nature of being human gives us a clue.

Distractions are very important to life and our very survival.??Right from the outset of living in caves it was quite useful whilst cooking dinner, to hear something threatening outside that may be about to make us the centre of their evening meal.?And whilst we don’t necessarily have to think about a sabre-toothed tiger assaulting us so much these days we still rely on distractions to keep us safe.??

Think about your trip to complete your commute to work or the school run – if your brain wasn’t hard-wired to be alert to external stimuli that is willing to be distracted from its task you might be driving down the street blissfully unable to see the cyclist coming out from the side road or a child’s ball passing in front shortly followed by its owner or the brake lights of the stopped traffic in front.?

Ever found your brain on auto-pilot and wondered how you got to your destination???That’s your brain eliminating distractions to focus on something else and whilst that sounds marvellous we all know how disconcerting it feels to have no recollection how you steered the car to its destination.

THE CASE FOR ACTUALLY BEING MORE DISTRACTED

Distractions can also be good and positive things that create spontaneity and innovation.???If DaVinci, Newton, Galileo and others had followed their teachers’ advice to avoid being distracted we may have missed out on some the world’s best innovations and discoveries that came about because of a distraction in nature that then went on to inspire them to consider a design in engineering or architecture.

When you unfocus you activate your brain's default mode network. This means your brain goes into a kind of eco-mode using only 20% of its power to keep going on whatever you're wanting to do, even if that's an essential but not ambitious task such as standing up straight and not falling over.

The good news is the 80% power that's left automatically defaults into something quite amazing. We may think or our bosses may think that the DMN is a "simply do nothing" network but actually what happens is our brain starts activating old memories and the present, going backwards and forwards recombining stories and elements into new stories. And this is where creativity and your bright ideas start to come from. In a strange way you can't achieve this from focussing, you become creative through unfocussing - letting your mind wander. My creative ideas rarely flow when I am sitting at my desk - they appear to me a bit randomly when I am out running in countryside or walking the dog - this is my 80% doing the stuff of genius for me.

When we were taught as young children that distractions were bad, it turns out this is not so simple.??We need distractions, we just don’t need them going on all the time.?Fighting and resisting the urge to respond to a distraction absorbs mental energy in itself and is really challenging to achieve.??What we need instead is to create space where we allow ourselves to be distracted and space where we will mentally push distractions into when we don’t really need them.??It’s about organising our day in this way.

Want to create an energy boost.?Here’s two things to try.

-???????Recognise the impact of distractions.??Activities that call on your executive functions such as preparing to chair a meeting, writing that critical report, considering an employee evaluation tax the brain.??If you permit distractions, you’ll lose far more than the time taken to handle the “just a minute” intervention

-???????Practice improving your recovery time from distractions.?Research shows your recovery time from distractions can be improved by how open minded you are to new experiences and how rigidly you plan your day - the more rigid, the harder it is for you to recover from distractions

And for all those who just feel they're not build to exist inside a rectangular box at work - get used to having short moments in time where you're undistracted but revel in the creativity your brain can unleash when you just let your mind wander.

PS I love to hear your comments and thoughts on this, as ever these words and thoughts are my own - do add a comment if you've the time. To get more leadership insights or if you are out in a field letting your mind wander and would just like me to read these thoughts in a podcast to you - you can get it all for free over here www.theenergyleader.com