Word-Of-the-Week #1059: Distraction
November 21, 2024 by Susan Clarke
Distraction – something that makes it difficult to pay attention.
How good are you at staying focused when you’re working on multiple projects? Do you tend to want to complete them all at the same time?
This week’s WOW “The Myth of Multi-Tasking” comes from longtime friend Bill Marvin, The Restaurant Doctor.
“In case you wonder why your young workers have such a hard time paying attention or staying focused, I offer this insight from Roy H. Williams:
Joe Kraus was co-founder of excite.com in 1993. Today he’s a partner at Google Ventures, an angel investor at LinkedIn and on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Kraus says we live in a culture of distraction. Prior to the availability of smartphones, we accessed the internet an average of 5 times a day. Now the average is 27 times a day. Kraus is worried about this:
“The effect of all of this [connectivity] is that we’re increasingly distracted. The funny part about distraction is that it’s a worsening condition. The more distracted we are, the more distractible we become.”
“Some people call switching our attention from one thing to another ‘multi-tasking’ like we’re a computer with dual cores running two simultaneous processes. Except we’re not.
Numerous brain studies have shown that what we call ‘multi-tasking’ in humans is not multi-tasking at all. Your brain is merely switching its attention back and forth between two tasks.”
“Those studies have shown that we’re dumber when we do this, an average of 10 IQ points dumber. That’s twice as much as smoking a joint dumber. And we’re also 40% less efficient at whatever it is we’re doing.”
“But my favorite part about multi-tasking is that the more you do it, the worse you are at it. It’s one of the only things where the more you practice it, the worse you get at it.”
“When you practice distraction, which is what multi-tasking really is, you’re training your brain to pay attention to distracting things. The more you train your brain to pay attention to distractions, the more you get distracted and the less able you are to focus even for brief periods of time on the two or three things you were trying to get done in your ‘multi-tasking’ in the first place.
How’s that for self-defeating?”
This week’s focus is on distractions. How often do you find yourself unable to pay attention? Would you like to make more efficient use of your time? How would it feel to focus on one project at a time?
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