![]() Changing the context around you can increase your focus, simply by making focusing easier. We can use this same theory for distractions. For instance, if you’re trying to smoke less or drink less coffee it would make sense to keep those vices away from you-and perhaps bring the candy dish a little closer. ![]() Now, not all of us want to eat less candy, but the same strategy can prove effective in other areas. When something is in reach and easy to get to, we’ll grab it, eat it, or pay attention to it.īut making candy that little bit more effort to eat makes us less likely to do so. So how is this relevant to fighting distraction? The key is that context affects us in a big way. People ate half as much if we simply moved the candy dish off their desk and placed it six feet away. And when food is further away, we eat less: When food is closer, says Wansink, we eat more. Now, this may sound unrelated, but Wansink’s work has shown something that proves relevant in terms of distractions, as well.Īccording to Wansink, context makes a bigger difference to our eating habits than anything else:Įveryone - every single one of us - eats how much we eat largely because of what’s around us. Change your contextīrian Wansink is a professor at Cornell who studies eating behavior. And we know that the worst distractions are those created by other people, and anything that’s unpredictable.īut what can we do to keep our focus when distractions abound and we have work to do? 1. So we know that we all get distracted-a lot. The problem is that having visible walls can make us talk louder than we otherwise would, because we feel more protected from others in the room, but we actually end up distracting our colleagues even more. Because we struggle to predict the flow of a conversation when we can only hear one side of it, hearing a colleague on the phone, for instance, is particularly hard to tune out from.Īnd, surprisingly, putting up temporary walls between cubicles to separate co-workers in open office spaces can make this problem worse. When you combine these two weaknesses, you can see why research has shown that overhearing just one side of a conversation is one of the worst distractions we humans can face. As a result, it’s hard for us to tune other people out.Īpart from humans, we’re also terrible at ignoring anything that’s unpredictable. Part of the reason we struggle with distractions, according to Alan Hedge, a “workplace design expert” at Cornell University, is that humans are social creatures, which makes us innately curious about other people. The effects were similar across both lengths of distractions, with participants losing their place and making mistakes more often after both short and longer distractions. ![]() It turns out, even very short distractions can affect our focus and performance. The study tested short (about two seconds long) and long (about four seconds) distractions to test how the different lengths of interruption affected the participants’ focus. David RockĪnother study tested how people reacted to distractions while they completed complicated computer-based tasks. …there’s no way not to be distracted by distractions, it’s built into the brain in the way we pay attention to novelty. Rock says after an interruption it takes most of us 25 minutes to get back on track with our work. We’re also not too good at getting back to work after being distracted. It turns out most people get distracted very easily, and very often.Īccording to David Rock, executive director of the NeuroLeadership Institute and author of Your Brain at Work, one study found office distractions eat up over two hours on average every day.īut being distracted isn’t the worst part. If you get distracted as easily as I do, don’t feel alone. So the world is making things very, very difficult. Most of the entities in our lives really want us to make mistakes in their favor. ![]() Imagine you walk down the street and every store is trying to get your money right now in your pocket you have a phone and every app wants to control your attention right now. The world is not acting in our long-term benefit. So I need to know as much as anyone how to overcome the temptation of distractions that abound in the modern workplace. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the time I focus for less than eleven minutes before being distracted. But then I paid attention to how much typing I did in this article before my attention drifted to something else. ![]() I was shocked when I read that, and didn’t quite believe it. ![]()
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