What’s a rose smell like again?

I hope that you’re reading this on a smartphone, because if you are, you’re living evidence of the issues I’m about to highlight.

Plenty has been said about the effects of smartphones in our lives – from the proliferation of social media lowering self-esteem levels, to everyone watching their children’s school concerts through the screens of phone, instead of simply living in the moment. We know there are issues with smart devices, but those issues bleed further into our lives than we can possibly fathom, and we are seeing the effects of this in business too.

I’m fresh off reading a book – the physical, paper version, not a compressed version on my iPhone – by Johann Hari called Stolen Focus, in which he highlights two key issues among many that are tripping up humanity. One is that today’s society is based on economic growth, which requires everything to either grow or speed up to maintain a healthy economic environment. Along with this pace, human attention spans are shrinking, everything is getting smaller, and we’re moving away from what makes us happy. The social media/click ecosystem is a strong example of this.

And the second is that smart devices, especially your phone, are built to distract us as much as possible. We get notifications for everything; from sales we’re missing on Amazon to ones about “people you may know” on LinkedIn and Instagram (and now Threads – thankfully no-one is using it and it may go the way of the Myspaces and Google Pluses of years gone by!). I’m pretty sure we also get notifications from our phone asking if we want to turn on notifications.

We’re so busy working, resting and playing on our phones that we don’t have time to stop and smell the roses anymore, and we’re so busy looking down, we no longer know where the roses are anyway. We literally have to dodge people walking along the street staring at their phones instead of watching where they are going! The smartphone has become a vacuum for our consciousness in the same way that the dementors behave in the Harry Potter series, they are sucking our presence away from us.

It's no surprise then that these issues of focus are creeping in and becoming more common in the workplace and in business. The faster we move, the more we miss things. We can’t maintain this pace and keep across everything. It’s impossible. Add to this the proliferation of smart phones and the acceptance of their unmitigated use and disruption to our attention as being normal and things break very quickly. It’s also no coincidence that at Profectus we’re busier than we’ve ever been. The rate of errors we’re helping rectify and recoup for – transactional, process, people, systems, you name it – across organisations large and small, are at an all-time high.

To cherry pick four major organisations we work with across the retail, finance and supply chain sectors, between FY20 and FY23 they encountered 10,268 contract compliance irregularities requiring correction. All of these could have been avoided – but it’s understandable that they weren’t, given the sheer pace people are expected to move at to maintain “economic growth”, coupled with the level of personal distraction the workforce is subjected to by their own devices. This all means errors like this are just going to happen again and again and again, and it's going to get worse and worse with time.

The solution is seemingly to put big-ticket IT systems in place to automate processes and address any issues with more technology. But these systems are complex and time consuming, and to avoid the complexity and save time people simply go around them, leading to even more issues of complexity. It’s like addressing the problem of the cane beetle in Australia by introducing the cane toad.

So what can we do?

Work isn’t going to slow down anytime soon, but our rest and play times can. So put the phone down, go outside and touch some grass. Let’s give ourselves an hour or two back in the day to enjoy a dinner with loved ones, smell some roses, and watch our children’s school concerts in high-def human vision.

Giving ourselves a break from distraction may just have a huge difference to our lives in the long run. I highly recommend you get a paper copy of Stolen Focus and read it cover to cover, it has certainly woken me up and I am making different choices as a result (thank you Johann Hari).