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Distraction · Humanity Working

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's distracted.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's like we're working with our brains in ten places at once.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Why is this getting worse?
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: What's that?
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, I think I got you.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, I mean, we've we've talked about elements of this before, but we basically live in environments that are designed to fragment our attention.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: The more our attention is fragmented, the more that the parties, the technology companies that want to get bits of our attention can get them.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so there is a real there's a real benefit and an enormous amount of of money that is being spent to pull a bit of your attention.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: And frankly, we're vic we're victims of that.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so it's important to, you know, to understand that it is a um it is a natural human condition to get distracted.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the modern world in which we live um means that distraction is gonna happen more and more and more.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um it even translates to how the work environments in which we sit are designed.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um there are people out there that are uh that are productivity experts, some of whom claim that one of the worst things to ever have been invented was a multitasking operating system.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then shortly after that, one of the worst things to be invented were tabs on our browsers, right?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because um this is even in a work setting, we're loading up and loading up our environment over the course of a day, or if you haven't rebooted your computer maybe over the course of a week with more and more and more things that can distract us.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh add into that notification city, notifications everywhere.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: I would love if I could change one word in the English language, I would change notifications to distractions, right?
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: It would be like, oh, I've I've have I enabled a distraction on my phone.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's good.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a um it's it's just all around us, and it's something that that uh that is deeply challenging for us.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: How do we fight back?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first is a is a deep acknowledgement of it, right?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: We uh this there's some really important things to note.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um They say that there are two types of people in the world, um people who think they can multitask and people who know that they cannot.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah um and the sure, some people are mildly better at multitasking than other people, but we're talking about degrees of badness.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody's bad at multitasking.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Microsoft did a study back in the early 2000s, and they looked at the average amount of time that it takes to get back on task when you've been pulled off a task.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: And being pulled off a task can mean anything from somebody knocks on your door in the office and says, Hey, can we quickly talk about this?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, to a ping on your phone, um, to just you losing track, right?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: And you going down a rabbit hole by one of those tabs that is uh that is open.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: They managed the this was done a while ago, and I would be intrigued to see if the research was done again, but they looked at the average amount of time that it takes people to get back on track when they lose track.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and it was over 20 minutes.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: So if you think about you think about how often that happens, that is a source of massive loss of personal productivity, personal effectiveness, whatever you want to call it.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: So the start of this is just really acknowledging how difficult this uh this is.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: But the main thing is to really work extensively on techniques that will help you uh that will help you combat it.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: Pomodoro technique is one.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh for those people that don't know what the Pomodoro technique is, um it's uh a short period of focused energy devoted to a single task.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Standard Pomodoro technique uh time is 25 minutes.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: People do shorter ones and ever so slightly longer ones, but that's 25 minutes of focused energy, then a three or four minute break, or maybe even a little longer, um, and then another 25-minute uh burst of energy and so on and so forth.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then as part of that technique, um you're supposed to track what are known as external and external and internal um uh interruptions, they call it.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: But basically, it's distractions if you think about it.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a it's somebody interrupted you and caused you to do something else, or you you interrupted your own train of thought and ended up doing something else.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you track those things, you track when that's happening, then you've got something to measure and something that you can uh that you can work on.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: So at a personal level, that's sort of like the the training that you can uh that you can do that can really help you with this.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I know for me, uh I use I use full screen to help me with that in in meetings.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, for example.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I have a big giant screen, so it's actually a little overkill sometimes.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: But also I know what's behind that is 25 tabs open in Google, email, Teams chats, um controlling your I love calling that distractions, controlling your distractions is great, but at the same time, it also reminded me that sometimes we build systems and we build in notification by design to move things along.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: So we're actually contributing to the chaos purposefully to meet some other metric or some other way of working is like we're purposefully gonna bug you until you do your thing.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's a couple of things that you brought up there, Matt, that I really want to hone in on.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned about going full screen, and that is absolutely terrific.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, what's really interesting is that um there is a bunch of research out there that shows that just the existence of these things, you kind of alluded to yourself, the stuff that's behind that full screen, yeah, yeah, you know is back there.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the really classic examples of that is the phone on the uh on the on the desk.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: There was a study that was done, I want to say it was about five years ago or so.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: And what they did is they took some people that were doing uh that were in an exam setting.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: And uh in one case, they asked the group of people taking the exam to have their phones put their phones uh to basically switch their phones off because they were taking an exam, but have their phone next to them on the desk.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then the second group of people, exactly the same, the only difference was that they had to put their phones in a bag on the floor.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: The people that had the phone on the desk, even though it was switched off, did markedly worse.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Markedly worse.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because our brains were so attuned to it might be there might be something, there might be something, there might be something, and it was pulling us away constantly.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the tabs, the stuff that's sitting behind your full screen, those do that, those fulfill much the same thing.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so this leads me to the other bit of advice that we give people on this, which is break the work that you do down into focused chunks.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you need a routine before you begin the focused chunk.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's only gonna take two minutes, right?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: But it is what are the things that I need open for this particular task, and I'm gonna close down everything else.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: Personally, often now to enforce that routine, I will often actually, um, because I've got a Mac and they reboot nice and quick, I will often reboot my Mac and then open up the three or four or five things that I that I need.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then I go to work on what I do.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I've seen significantly better results as part of that.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's that routine to prepare yourself for the piece of work, uh, the piece of work that you're about to do.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: That reminds you that it's time to focus on them.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: So it's improving your focus by creating, clearing the decks and creating the right environment for you to be able to do good work in the period in which you're doing it.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's some good tools out there, like little apps and stuff.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's a lot of the writing tools that have like a distraction free zone that won't let you go back to the other apps for an hour or whatever.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: You can set a timer and be like, turn off the internet for an hour, everything's gone.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, like uh if you've ever gone somewhere, if you've been fortunate enough to go somewhere where the sell signal is doesn't work anymore, like on vacation, like it just doesn't work.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: You don't even care about your phone anymore.
• 9:29
  unknown: Yeah.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's not bringing you new stuff anymore.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes useless almost.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: You're like, oh, it's that's right.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing new, I can just put it away.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Very fascinating.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: And remember, airplane mode isn't just for airplanes either.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: So you can you can use airplane mode as a form of focus mode if you want to.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: And don't think uh don't forget about things like e-ink tablets, the e-ink writers and things like that, right?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: They can be much more uh an area for much more focus.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, things like the remarkable and the supernote and things like that can be really, really helpful in that in regards to that.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Paul.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Till next time.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: We're done.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: All right, see ya.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Matt.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
• 10:11
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• 10:15
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• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to learn more about how Billion Minds gets companies ready for the future of work by building adaptable, resilient employees, look for them on LinkedIn or visit their website at billionminds.com.