Planet Focus: The Art of Attention

Having read up recently on distractions in the workplace and the ills of multitasking, I wondered how businesses can cope with the demand for their employees' attention without appearing overbearing or authoritarian. In other words, without limiting employee access to the internet or regulating device usage. Could they engender a desire to focus in their employees? Today's article in the NYTimes, "Fighting a War Against Distraction," mentions a few ways that innovative companies, such as IBM, are trying to do just that:

"TO combat overload, we also need to look to our environments. That’s why a few pioneering companies are creating places or times for uninterrupted, focused creative thought. I.B.M. employees practice “Think Fridays” worldwide, avoiding or cutting back on e-mail, meetings and interruptions. Other firms are setting aside unwired, quiet rooms."

When I was working in India, my office had three rooms. One for meetings, one for the boss, and one for the ten other employees. Crowded around the table in the center of the room, all ten were writing with pens and paper, dumbfounding me. Now, as India continues to increase its use of technology, we're trying to cut back.

Relating our digital distractions to our lives at home again, the author insists that "split-focus" implies an obvious corollary: "You aren't worth my time."

Remember when you used to memorize phone numbers? You might even be able to recall one or two (I can remember my old land line number and an old girlfriend's number). Those days, you kept in touch with 5 or 6 friends on a day-to-day basis because that is all you could handle. It was never before so easy as it is now to maintain hundreds of superficial relationships. So caught up on not "missing" anything, we rarely take the time to build something meaningful. We don't have time.

On the same note, people know when they are just being kept in touch with for the sake of it. It is pretty obvious who is interested in having a conversation versus who just wants a status update. While there are clearly benefits to maintaining connections with old friends and coworkers, maybe its time to take a look through your contact list and weed out the ones that aren't necessary. As Marci Alboher concludes:

“Wisdom is the art of knowing what to overlook,” wrote William James, the father of American psychology research. Long ago, he identified the foremost challenge of our time: how to allocate our attention. And now, we’re beginning to discover what he foretold: that living distracted just isn’t smart.