Distracted - attention deficit in the workplace.

[Dover]

DISTRACTED? And how. Beeped and pinged, interrupted and inundated, overloaded and hurried — that’s how we live today. We prize knowledge work — work that relies on our intellectual abilities — and yet increasingly feel that we have no time to think. For all our connectivity, we often catch little more than snippets and glimpses of one another.

The greatest casualty of our mobile, high-tech age is attention. By fragmenting and diffusing our powers of attention, we are undermining our capacity to thrive in a complex, ever-shifting world. Consider the mounting costs of this widespread distraction:

* The average knowledge worker switches tasks every three minutes, and, once distracted, a worker takes nearly a half-hour to resume the original task, according to Gloria Mark, a leader in the new field of “interruption science.”

* Interruptions and the requisite recovery time now consume 28 percent of a worker’s day, the business research firm Basex estimates. The risks are clear. As one top executive told me, “Knowledge work can’t be done in sound bites.”

* Employees who are routinely interrupted and lack time to focus are more apt to feel frustrated, pressured and stressed, according to separate studies by Ms. Mark and the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit group.

* Under deadline pressure, workers produce creative work on days when they are focused, not when they are scattered and interrupted, a study published in the Harvard Business Review found.

cont'd
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/jobs/22shifting.html?em&ex=1214452800&en=554d48273b72f3ab&ei=5087%0A

[no_hypocrisy]

1. My boss periodically complains about my "low producitivity", but he

has the luxury of choosing when to stop and start. Phone calls, faxes, copying, scanning and e-mailing, priorities being reordered, etc. necessitate about five minutes to become reoriented where you "were" with the task you put down three hours ago and now resume.

[rucky]

2. One thing I started doing...

is answer emails only twice a day - in the morning and mid-afternoon. I won't even look at my inbox until then. If somebody really needs to get a hold of me, they'll call.

[Dover]

3. Being present.

Kind of like the 'power of now'(book by Eckhart Tolle) goes to the office.

However one defines or considers it, this is a big challenge for everyone. I do wonder, though this may seem counter intuitive, if the speed of our technologies is only frustrating the slower lower mind (ie the intellect and rational linear left brain), which forces the development of our right brain's holistic and intuitive side due to frustration of the left brain because so broad a sprectrum of information inundation requires us to process differently? Does that make sense?
So maybe all this frustration is actually one more way in which we are forced to turn off the intellect and turn on presence, or at least find a better balance. Or Western society values the left brain type activity above the right, so we've been out of balance for a long time imo.
When a barrage of information and activity is coming at you all at once at high speed, you don't have time to sort and contemplate. You've got to take it in in larger pieces with a broader more comprehensive basis for 'order' or synthesis.

[winston61]

4. One phrase that makes my stomach churn is

'multi-tasking'. There is no such thing. The loon I used to work for made it her mantra with the result that she never got shit done and was always fretting and bitching at me because I attended to one thing at a time and got it done. People who believe in multi-tasking can't prioritize and as a result look around at the end of each day, wonder where the time went and bitch 'cause they got nothing done. If you are in a job interview and the boss mentions multi-tasking, run away if you have a choice. They will use multi-tasking as a stick to beat you with when they are fucking up and need someone else to blame.

[mrreowwr_kittty]

6. So true. nt

[TrogL]

5. This article is a real distraction