Be less distracted
Ever have one of those days when you finish up feeling drained and just seem unable to even summon the energy to cook a meal or reach for the remote. Then another day when the sun feels like it is perpetually shining and your productivity is on fire? This is energy at work. And believe it or not what we believe and what we choose to do has a lot of impact on how we build and sustain energy to get us through the day, week or a lifetime.
When I work with clients on their energy framework we focus on four elements:
Our core energy what interests us, excites us, how we feed our physical selves to make things happen
Our connective energy how we engage and work with others so we produce more powerful and impactful outcomes by combining everyone’s energies together
Our creative energy how we use curiosity, optimism, intuition and experimentation to find new pathways through common and uncommon problems
Our catalytic energy how we energise others, including those we leave so that no talents are left wasted and underutilised
These are all great subjects to work through. All are important. So what we’ll be doing over the next weeks and months is taking each element in rotation giving you some hints and tips of things you can try to improve your energy levels and productivity.
In that spirit let’s kick off today’s blog looking at our core energy and the topic of distractions.
WHY WE JUST CAN’T RESIST DISTRACTIONS
Go to the self-improvement section of any bookstore and I wager you will find a book that imploring you to achieve more by limiting distractions. The curious part of my brain wonders what is it about our nature and being that means we’re so drawn into distractions and so many of us struggle to bring them into order. Today’s blog is all about exploring distractions and why we find them irresistible.
Hands up who’d like to find a way of creating more time in the day?
Covid and lockdown has teased even the most reluctant technophobes into the wonderful world of zoom, gmeet and teams. Families and friends endlessly innovated virtual get togethers and our business lives quickly adapted to “let’s have a quick Teams call”. These days a suggestion of a teleconference feels from another era such is the progress over the past two years.
Hands up every parent out there who remembers or is currently raising a toddler? It’s a tough period in life. Now my son is grown up but I seem to be inviting technology toddlers into my life all the time. Every device I buy or own now appears to have its own inbuilt inner toddler, the one that is constantly tugging at your trouser leg asking for your attention and then becoming increasingly noisy until you relent and switch focus.
Notifications pop-up constantly whether on my phone, tablet, watch, laptop screen all wanting my attention. Messages from colleagues appear along with the tempting little toaster peeks embedded in outlook that just tease you with “Important message from big boss” that’s almost impossible to resist. It’ll only take a minute. Or so you think. But you’d be wrong.
When we are distracted by these messages, the impact is not just in switching to read the email. A study by Gloria Mark at University of California looked at how our brains cope when we are distracted between tasks. Her study found that although typically we’re able to return back to our original task and complete it without an impact on quality this creates a cognitive load on our brains.
In other words to recover from the two minute quick read of that email it may take us a whopping 25 minutes of additional brain-effort to recover our flow. We do this by either working longer hours to recover or by putting more stress on our brains where that exhaustion impacts other tasks later in the day. Sooner or later it all catches up with you whether that’s at work or more frequently when we switch back to home-life in the evening.
How many of you when you were a kid at school ever had a school report to the effect of Ian would be completely awesome if only he could focus more and BE LESS DISTRACTED. Positioned this way in countless school reports the choices are laid out before us – focus vs distraction, awesomeness vs well whatever the opposite of awesomeness is.
So teacher has spoken. And the the simple solution therefore must be to discipline ourselves to avoid distractions right? So why is it so much harder to do than to say? Neuroscience gives us a clue.
Distractions are very important to life and our very survival. Right from the outset of living in caves it was quite useful whilst cooking dinner, to hear something threatening outside that may be about to make us the centre of their evening meal. And whilst we don’t necessarily have to think about a sabre-toothed tiger assaulting us so much these days we still rely on distractions to keep us safe. Think about your trip to complete your commute to work or the school run – if your brain wasn’t hard-wired to be alert to external stimuli that is willing to be distracted from its task you might be driving down the street blissfully unable to see the cyclist coming out from the side road or a child’s ball passing in front shortly followed by its owner or the brake lights of the stopped traffic in front.
Ever found your brain on auto-pilot and wondered how you got to your destination? That’s your brain eliminating distractions to focus on something else and whilst that sounds marvellous we all know how disconcerting it feels to have no recollection how you steered the car to its destination.
Distractions can also be good and positive things that create spontaneity and innovation. If DaVinci, Newton, Galileo and others had followed their teachers’ advice to avoid being distracted we may have missed out on some the world’s best innovations and discoveries that came about because of a distraction in nature that then went on to inspire them to consider a design in engineering or architecture.
When we were taught as young children that distractions were bad, it turns out this is not so simple. We need distractions, we just don’t need them going on all the time. Fighting and resisting the urge to respond to a distraction absorbs mental energy in itself and is really challenging to achieve. What we need instead is to create space where we allow ourselves to be distracted and space where we will mentally push distractions into when we don’t really need them. It’s about organising our day in this way.
Just as toddlers are notoriously selfish by nature, this means finding ways of segmenting our day so that the technological toddlers that surround us are put into day care for just a few hours when we want to really deploy executive functions in our brain – deep focus and decision making – and then give them some time later to run wild, make some noise before putting them back into technology day-care.
Despite what teacher said we are hard wired to perceive distractions and It turns out that we use energy just in the process of fighting distractions and we’re not terribly successful either.
Want to create an energy boost. Here’s three things to try.
- Recognise the impact of distractions. Activities that call on your executive functions such as preparing to chair a meeting, writing that critical report, considering an employee evaluation tax the brain. If you permit distractions, you’ll lose far more than the time taken to handle the “just a minute” intervention
- Practice improving your recovery time from distractions. Research shows your recovery time from distractions can be improved by:
o How open minded you are to new experiences whether you see new information and experiences as positive influences a mindset that recovers better from distractions
o How rigidly you hold your plan for the day if you’re a minute-by-minute planner then consider crafting fire breaks in the day to get back on course
- Park the technological toddlers in digital day-care whilst you’re needing to do tasks that require decisions and judgement and you’ll achieve more, faster
