👉 By William Park
Should ‘deep focus’ become a central pillar of workplace culture?
The constant ping of messages that keep us plugged into work chatter might be doing more harm than good. We feel we must respond – it is about work, after all. But always being switched on means we never have the chance to think deeply. And that is a problem for companies that want to get the most out of their employees.
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Copyright : Evgenii Naumov
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The next great revolution in the office will need to correct this, according to one man who wants to reset the way we work. He believes that the value someone can bring to a company will be judged not by their skill, but by their ability to focus. But how do we find the time to shut off distractions and do our best work?
Our workplaces are set up for convenience, not to get the best out of our brains, says Cal Newport, bestselling author of books including Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, and a Georgetown University professor. In knowledge sector jobs, where products are created using human intelligence rather than machines, we must be switched on at all times and prepared to multitask. These are two things that are not compatible with deep, creative, insightful thinking.
[…] Psychologists thought that busy multitaskers possessed abnormal control over their attention. But evidence suggests that multitaskers do not have a particular gift for being able to juggle multiple projects. In fact, in many cognitive tasks, heavy multitaskers underperform. Our brains have a limited capacity for what they can work on at any given moment. And using tricks to cram as much into our working day as possible might be doing more harm than good.
Being switched on at all times and expected to pick things up immediately makes us miserable, says Newport. […]
Because it is so easy to dash off a quick reply on email, Slack or other messaging apps, we feel guilty for not doing so, and there is an expectation that we will do it. [… According to Newport:] “The average knowledge worker is responsible for more things than they were before email. This makes us frenetic […]”
Fighting for concentration
What might being wired for work at all times lead to? Inevitably, burnout. Newport describes this way of working as a “hyperactive hivemind”. Unstructured conversations on messaging apps and meetings dropped into diaries on the fly congest our day. His objective, to give people the space to do their best work without distraction, is the subject of his next book: The World Without Email.
[… T]he important thing is to encourage a culture where clear communication is the norm.
Newport is advocating for a more linear approach to workflows. People need to completely stop one task in order to fully transition their thought processes to the next one. However, this is hard when we are constantly seeing emails or being reminded about previous tasks. Some of our thoughts are still on the previous work – an effect called attention residue.
Annoyingly, the busier we are, the more we switch tasks. So, feeling busy is not conducive to deep concentration. Estimates of how long it takes us to refocus after a distraction vary. But at the top end, one study found on average it takes us 23 minutes and 15 seconds to regain deep focus after an interruption.
The flipside is that it is very convenient to have everyone in an ongoing conversation, Newport says. But convenience is never the goal in business, it is value. The assembly line revolutionised car production, but it is not a convenient system – it is the system that produces the most cars quickly.
Our workplaces should learn from production lines
According to Newport, the knowledge sectors that operate in the most focus-oriented way are areas like software engineering, where the goal is to produce a product. “Agile, scrum and sprint-based executions have been used in these sectors for a while,” says Newport. “They work on only one thing for three days and during that time the product is their whole focus. Software engineers never let things unfold in an ad hoc manner. This is more amenable to the way the brain operates.” (Continue reading)
👉 READ FULL ARTICLE: How to escape the ‘hyperactive hivemind’ of modern work
