Jay’s was 18 distractions per hour - What’s your number?
A young executive in the financial services sector (we’ll call her Jay) shared with me how she had been interested to find out how much she was dealing with distractions from technology in the course of her day-to-day work. This article shares her findings and asks an important question - what's your number? And how is it stopping you from achieving your best work. Let us begin.
Something about Jay, and you
Jay works in the very intellectually demanding field of business consulting. Her work depends on her ability to produce tight analysis and viable solutions to business problems in crisp, well-written reports and engaging presentations. In short, Jay is a knowledge-worker. And more of us are or are becoming knowledge-workers because knowledge-work is becoming more and more valuable every day.Whether you are a consultant, app-developer, accountant, entrepreneur, sales executive, you name it, the need to be cutting-edge in your skills and work is becoming more pressing. And, in the 21st Century, the stairway to greater success and fulfilment seems to be made out of high-quality blocks of work.Interestingly, this era is also the era of hyper-connectivity, hustle and bustle for most people in the industrialized nations. The result is that we value and reward high-quality work more than ever but finding adequate requisite focus-time to produce said high-quality work is more difficult than ever.
Distraction is the archenemy of productivity.
We are hyper-connected and hyper-distracted. And distraction is the archenemy of productivity.Which brings us back to Jay.
The Experiment
Jay suspected she was not getting the most out of her day and she guessed this was due to distractions. So, being the analytical person that she is, Jay decided to conduct an experiment.She kept a sheet of paper next to her and for one hour, she tallied each time she got distracted from her work by some form of communications technology – email, social media, texts, phone calls etc. This she felt, would give her an idea of how much time she actually spent doing work that she had prioritized as important for that hour (and day).The results surprised her.
The Results
By Jay’s count, in one hour, she had been interrupted 18 times! This translates roughly to 126 distractions assuming a 7-hour work day. Now before you stats gurus pull out your Texas Instruments calculators, I do understand that this a rough estimate and might not be statistically admissible in court. But the purpose of the exercise is not to build some iron-clad body of data, it was simply for Jay to get an idea of how her productivity was being affected by technology. And it turns out it was a lot!You might think “Well when you get distracted, you deal with it and just go back to work right?”It is not that simple. Research suggests that those distractions were doing more damage to Jay’s productivity than might seem immediately apparent.
The Research on Distractions and Multi-tasking
Results from brain studies indicate that it can take as long as 10 full minutes to regain full focus on a given task once you get distracted. Scientists, more and more, are dispelling the “multi-tasking” myth and replacing it with what I can describe as task-switching. I call it “Skippy-tasking” - much more fun and picturesque in my opinion. In the skippy-tasking model (a term the scientists did not use), rather than doing many things at once (multi-tasking), what is happening in reality in the brain is that you are actually skipping back and forth between tasks. And, here is the point, being less productive overall in the process.The reason is that the brain needs to refocus each time you switch between tasks. It needs to recruit new resources and regain perspective. And this takes time – especially when the tasks are mentally demanding.
What does this mean for Jay (and you)
This implies that for the most part of that hour, Jay was in a continuous process of trying to refocus. I mean, you only have 60 minutes in one hour after all. With 18 interruptions, there is hardly enough time to refocus for long enough to actually do your best work. Or any real work for that matter. And for a professional, doing good work is not an option.
I am forced to ask an important question - is our professional hyper-connectedness robbing us our long-term professional effectiveness?
Now in Jay’s defence, a large number of the 18 interruptions were work-related (emails, internal instant messages, client calls etc.). But I am forced to ask an important question - is our professional hyper-connectedness robbing us our long-term professional effectiveness?
Jay’s was 18. What’s yours?
I invite you to perform your own experiment and find out what your number is. How many times do you get interrupted per hour on average? And, where are those distractions coming from? You will see, that though those messages might not be bad in and of themselves, they are keeping you from producing your best work. And it might be worth devising and deploying some strategies to keep them at bay, at least until you are ready to deal with them. Your professional success and personal fulfilment might depend on it.Until the next post, be your best and do your best.
