Have you ever started something at work, only to be distracted by something? It could be a notification pinging up on your phone, your mind starts to wander, and you find yourself thinking of what you’re going to have for dinner. Maybe you get an email notification that pulls your attention away from the task you were focused on. Whatever the case, you’re caught in a cyclone of distraction.
If you find yourself nodding at any of these scenarios, rest assured, you’re not alone. If you feel like your attention span is super short, there are many like you.
In fact, a study by researchers at the University of California found something surprising. On average, we can only maintain our focus on a task for a scant 12 minutes before we experience interruption. Worse still, after we’ve been sidetracked, it takes us nearly half an hour to refocus on our task.
But why do we seem so drawn to distractions? Why does our attention fail so quickly in the face of disruptions?
The answer isn’t as simple as being foiled by a beep on a phone or an incoming email alert. It’s much more personal than that, as we hinted at in our piece on why we struggle to focus.
There’s something in our minds that’s making it more likely that we will fall prey to the numerous distractions around us. Let’s find out more about what causes our distractions to discover what it is.
Why Do We Get Distracted?
It’s true that there are many causes of distraction. For today though, we’ll talk about the 4 main culprits.
1. We’re Hardwired to Get Distracted
Our brains are designed to absorb new information and adapt to our environment. Unfortunately, this can be a weakness at times. Our brains are always seeking out new stuff and can therefore cause us to lose focus on the task at hand.
Studies involving humans and macaque monkeys have discovered that concertation isn’t continuous. We instead focus in a series of short bursts. In between those bursts, we become distracted. The brain is taking a break and searching for anything more exciting or important than the task you’re doing. You will eventually refocus if nothing more important pops up, but you will still lose some precious time.
This means our instinct can be a double edge sword. We could be deep into a task, and if there’s a sudden movement or loud noise our brain is likely to direct our attention toward the new stimulus. In a modern-day environment, this can make staying focused difficult.
2. Our World is Full of Distractions
Nowadays, we’re lucky to have access to wonderful technology and the internet. We have a treasure trove of information and ways to learn at our fingertips. See how you can learn super-fast and get ahead from our post on the subject. The trouble is, the very tools and resources that can drive productivity, also add to the numerous distractions surrounding us. The usual suspects when it comes to distractions are as follows:
- Emails.
- Calls and texts.
- The Internet.
Moreover, over half of workers say that meaningful work is often shunted because too much time is spent in meetings or on calls.
Such distractions are persistent and loud calls upon our attention and make focusing on one thing at a time nigh on impossible.
One study found our brain waves pulse at different frequencies when we encounter different types of stimuli. These pulses slow when we consciously focus on a task and speed up when we’re faced with automatic stimuli making it ever more challenging to concentrate in a world full of distractions.
That’s why one beep on a mobile phone is enough to pull your attention away from whatever task you were working on and then it takes more time than you realise to get back into the zone. The same is true if a headline catches your eye on a news site. It may only have been for a second, but it means you’ll have to refocus once again.
3. Our Attention Spans Are Short
Our brains tend to drift and wander. In fact, for almost half the time our minds aren’t focused, even if we think they are. Instead, our mind is wandering and meandering down a different path.
This doesn’t indicate we’re uninterested, bored, or uncommitted. Our attention spans are simply limited and when that threshold is reached, our brains begin to look for other things to concentrate on.
You know what it’s like. You dive into a task with enthusiasm and can concentrate fully at first but as time goes by, your attention starts to wander. This change can be so subtle as to not be immediately recognisable, but it does happen. It’s a natural human response to boredom. Our brains are just seeking something new so that we won’t be exhausted by monotony.
We must recognise that we have naturally short attention spans if we want to create effective strategies that help us work in harmony with it and be at our most productive.
4. We Have Poor Time Management Skills
Many of us aren’t formally taught how to parcel out and manage our time effectively. Instead, it’s a still many of us taught ourselves, in an unsystematic way.
Unfortunately for us, having poor time management skills can invite distraction and damage productivity.
How?
- It’s difficult to focus if you don’t have clearly defined goals, meaning you’re likely to get sidetracked by more trivial tasks.
- You will procrastinate more when you’re not focused and that is the death knell of productivity. It’s also harder to return to a task you’ve started and been putting off finishing.
- Without learning to divide our time effectively we’ll constantly be context-switching which can be massively detrimental to our productivity. We could also end up getting bogged down in the details.
Check out this post on how to improve your time management skills.
Wrapping Up
We live in a world chock-full of distractions. They come at us from everywhere – be it from our own minds or the constant pinging of our email inbox, or buzz of our phones. The causes of distraction are as varied as they are common. They often interweave and amplify each other, but by understanding more about why we get distracted so easily we can come up with strategies to help us come with them so we can thrive in a world filled with endless distractions.
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