I pored through thousands of hours' worth of the latest research and interviewed leaders in neuroscience, social science, psychology, philosophy, and tech. Using myself – and eventually my company – as the lab rat, I experimented with ways to reduce distraction and improve focus. I spoke with CEOs and managers around the world – all of whom struggled to get their employees (and for many, themselves) to focus on the right things at the right time.
I saw that distraction affected every level of our professional culture. Questions like these haunted everyone, from small business owners to Fortune 100 executives:
What can we do about our e-mail problem?
How do we promote focus in an office of constant connectivity?
How do I get my people to stop wasting the whole day on their damn phone?
How do I avoid blowing a gasket the next time I see a millennial on Instagram at work?
Over the past six years, I've given speeches to hundreds of companies, consulted with some of the nation's most successful companies, and jumped into the trenches with CEOs and managers around the world – all with the goal of helping employees, leaders, and whole organizations deal with distraction. These organizations know all too well the challenges of overload, distraction, and constant connectivity. They don't know what to do about it. How can you preserve the benefits of accessibility without bringing with it all the chronic interruptions? Can you create an environment where attention is cherished and focus reigns?
Many leaders misdiagnose the problem altogether. Maybe you're one of them.
A client from a major financial institution recently asked me, “Can you help us reduce the number of e-mails we get every day?”
There's a surprisingly simple answer to this issue: It's called batch processing – waiting to review all of your e-mails together a few times a day, rather than continuously. I could have flown out to his office, spent 15 minutes teaching the technique, two hours eating a steak dinner with a $100 bottle of wine (both expensed), and then sent him the bill. Problem solved.
But inbox overload was just a symptom, not the disease. The client never thought to ask: Why is there so much e-mail in the first place?
As a certified speaker for the Center for Generational Kinetics, the number one millennial and generation Z research firm in the United States, I have addressed more than 200 audiences on the topic of how to bridge the generational divide. There's no complaint I haven't heard. The most prevalent: Millennials won't get off their phones.
I sympathize – with the phone part. The problem of distraction and constant connectivity affects employees of all ages, not just one demographic. According to a Nielsen report,14 for example, generation X spends 6 hours and 58 minutes a week on social media – 10 percent more than millennials. And gen Xers' time on everything from Twitter to Pinterest is increasing at a faster rate as well. Baby boomers are jumping on even more rapidly, which – perhaps – contributes to why gen Z is jumping off.15
Just as telling: Millennials consume far less media overall than their older counterparts, clocking in at 26 hours and 49 minutes per week. Gen X? Thirty-one hours and 40 minutes.16
But the overall problem isn't just about productivity. Constant connectivity affects every part of our personal, professional, and organizational lives. Recognize these symptoms?
• Your meetings lack focus and meaningful action. Some folks engage, but most duck into their phones or laptops – and everyone knows Chris is messaging the new intern.
• You and your employees have never been more in contact and less in sync. Missing is a deep sense of community, especially face-to-face communication.
• You and those you lead struggle to handle conflict and difficult conversations, especially in person. Empathy and “people skills” (once fodder for jokes about job candidates who lack “real” skills) have waned.
• Your organizational boundaries are fuzzy. Forget dedicated collaborative spaces – every room has essentially become the same room in terms of activity, behavior, and expectations.
• The boundary between work and home is even worse. Working from home can be a plus – so why are both productivity and domestic life suffering?
• Your well-prepared message fails to resonate amid shrinking attention spans. True audience engagement is elusive.
Clearly we're facing multiple battlefronts. But unwavering focus on one skirmish means getting outflanked from other directions. The key is to reassess every aspect of work.
The truth is, we'll never be moved to act until we clearly understand the cost of constant connectivity. (Most of us don't even know we're in the red.)
It costs your people time. A study from the University of Michigan revealed that multitasking results in a 40 percent drop in efficiency.17 That's more than three hours each workday. All the while, your people stress over not having enough time for their responsibilities.
It costs them quality. In a fascinating study, Dr. Harold Pashler of the University of California at San Diego tested the production of Harvard MBAs. When he added a second, basic task to their workload, their performances dropped to the level of an 8-year-old.18 Of course, the natural conclusion to all this is either help sharpen your employees' focus or save money by hiring second-graders.
It robs them of creativity. In the face of information overload, we fail to store new ideas in long-term memory. That means forgetting anniversaries and, more seriously, jeopardizing our creative thinking (though, come to think of it, I'm not sure anything is more serious than forgetting your anniversary). The magic happens when we connect ideas already in our brains that were never connected before. The more we can pull from memory, the more connections our brains can make. Voilà– creativity. Without the space to process or connect, your people can become virtual mockingbirds. They figuratively (and sometimes literally) retweet the hottest new ideas, but none of it gets stored on their mental hard drives. This means less material for later connections, which means less creative and critical thinking.
It erases meaning and purpose. Employees need time to consider the significance of their work. Engagement springs from the gaps that help us understand the “why” behind our endeavors. But there simply isn't space for purposeful reflection when your people jump from e-mail to meetings to texts to tweets to podcasts to sports updates – and finally to the pillow.
The ultimate cost is unhappy, burned-out employees who further retreat to their devices for escape or connection with people who also feel stuck at work.
In the words of Henry David Thoreau, “Men have become the tools of their tools.” We have lost control of our ability to choose where we spend our attention and instead become slaves of distraction. But there is a way out. Over the rest of this book, I break down the complex and systemic problem of distraction step by step and apply tangible, proven solutions that can be used in any workplace. To get on top of it, you have to rethink the following areas.
Communication
Consider the number of ways you can be reached, how you communicate with your people, and the interruptions that result. Is e-mail the one place for everything? Can we reduce inbox clutter? Does texting and messaging interfere or help? Would shorter meetings be more effective? Should we put phones and laptops aside, or keep them at