Little good comes from being distracted yet we seem incapable of focusing our attention. Among many qualities that suffer, recent research shows creativity takes a hit when you’re constantly busy. Being able to switch between focus and daydreaming is an important skill that’s reduced by insufferable busyness. As Stanford’s Emma Seppälä writes:
The idea is to balance linear thinking—which requires intense focus—with creative thinking, which is borne out of idleness. Switching between the two modes seems to be the optimal way to do good, inventive work.
She is not the first to point this out. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin made a similar plea in his 2014 book, The Organized Mind. Information overload keeps us mired in noise. In 2011, he writes, Americans consumed five times as much information as 25 years prior; outside of work we process roughly 100,000 words every day.
This saps us of not only willpower (of which we have a limited store) but creativity as well. He uses slightly different language than Seppälä—linear thinking is part of the central executive network, our brain’s ability to focus, while creative thinking is part of our brain’s default mode network. Levitin, himself a former music professional who engineered records by the Grateful Dead and Santana, writes:
Artists recontextualize reality and offer visions that were previously invisible. Creativity engages the brain’s daydreaming mode directly and stimulates the free flow and association of ideas, forging links between concepts and neural modes that might not otherwise be made.
Engaging creatively requires hitting the reset button, which means carving space in your day for lying around, meditating, or staring off into nothing. This is impossible when every free moment—at work, in line, at a red light—you’re reaching for your phone. Your brain’s attentional system becomes accustomed to constant stimulation; you grow antsy and irritable when you don’t have that input. You’re addicted to busyness.
And that’s dangerous for quality of life. As Seppälä points out many of the world’s greatest minds made important discoveries while not doing much at all. Nikola Tesla had an insight about rotating magnetic fields on a leisurely walk in Budapest; Albert Einstein liked to chill out and listen to Mozart on breaks from intense thinking sessions.
Paying homage to boredom—a valuable tool in the age of overload—journalist Michael Harris writes in The End of Absence that we start to value unimportant and fleeting sensations instead of what matters most. He prescribes less in the course of a normal day.
Perhaps we now need to engineer scarcity in our communications, in our interactions, and in the things we consume. Otherwise our lives become like a Morse code transmission that’s lacking breaks—a swarm of noise blanketing the valuable data beneath.
How to disconnect in a time when connection is demanded by bosses, peers, and friends? Seppälä makes four suggestions:
1. Make a long walk—without your phone—a part of your daily routine
2. Get out of your comfort zone
3. Make more time for fun and games
4. Alternate between doing focused work and activities that are less intellectually demanding
That last one is also recommended by Cal Newport, author of Deep Work. Newport is not on any social media and only checks email once a day, perhaps, and even that time is strictly regimented. What seems to be lost in being “connected” is really irreplaceable time gained to focus on projects. Without that time, he says, you’re in danger of rewiring your neural patterns for distraction.
Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.
That’s not a good sign for those who wish to perform creatively, which in reality is all of us. Research shows that the fear of missing out (FOMO) increases anxiety and takes a toll on your health in the long run. Of all the things to suffer, creative thinking is one of our greatest losses. Regardless of your vocation a flexible mindset open to new ideas and approaches is invaluable. Losing it just to check on the latest tweet or post an irrelevant selfie is an avoidable but sadly sanctioned tragedy.
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Derek is the author of Whole Motion: Training Your Brain and Body For Optimal Health. Based in Los Angeles, he is working on a new book about spiritual consumerism. Stay in touch on Facebook and Twitter.
The need for cognition, or NFC, is measured by a simple test that has been in use for decades. Subjects are tested by agreeing or disagreeing with questions such as “I only think as hard as I have to" or “I really enjoy a task that involves coming up with new solutions to problems". People with a high need for cognition will respond in ways affirming that they enjoy thinking. Those with a low score, not so much.
The study took 30 people who had a high or low NFC and measured their daily levels of physical activity. The results showed that those with a higher NFC were significantly less active than those with low NFC, though this difference was less pronounced on weekends when all subjects were more active.
The authors of the study, including Todd McElory of Florida Gulf Coast University, point out that persons with a lower need for cognition also have demonstrated a lower tolerance for boredom in previous studies. This suggests that those persons may look to physical activity as a means for stimulation. Persons with higher need for cognition would not require this distraction as they demonstrated an enjoyment of thinking.
The study only concerned 60 persons who were all college students over the course of a single week, and the results might be more applicable to young adults than to adults in general. The authors of the study noted this when discussing the spike in activity by all subjects on the weekends. So more research is certainly needed before all couch potatoes can claim to be philosophers.
Interestingly, this study found that persons with above-average intelligence tend to be thinner than average, however the findings were purely correlative rather than causal. Like everyone, intelligent people come in all shapes and sizes, no matter their laziness, an important thing to remember considering the health risks of a sedentary lifestyle are considerable and difficult to counter.
So there you have it; the findings are murky but the takeaway is not without value: if you have a high need for cognition you might need to spend a little more time moving. Or at least think about it.
Though still imbued with the Protestant work ethic passed down by the Puritans, and due to the fact that Americans are working longer hours than they have in decades, one would think US workers are more productive than ever before. And that’s true. Production has increased 74% from 1973 to 2013. But social media, pervasive in all other aspects in life, is beginning to bleed into the workspace and is having a substantial impact.
Though we would assume that productivity among the workforce has suffered, in fact, a study out of the University of California, Irvine finds that social media use by-and-large increases productivity. Another study from the University of Melbourne corroborated this. In the UC study, a few minutes of thumbing through one’s feed acted as a “mental palate cleanser,” helping them to recharge, and priming them ready for the next task at hand.
The latest is a Pew Research Center survey which probed deeper into the question of how social media affects the worksphere. Pollsters found both positive and negative aspects. Conducted in 2014, researchers surveyed 2,003 US adults. Participants were asked eight different ways in which they might use social media in the workplace.
34% were using it for a little mental downtime. 27% engaged with social media to stay connected to friends and family. 24% said they employed it for professional reasons. 20% used it to problem-solve work-related tasks. 17% were out to build rapport with colleagues. 12% said they used social media to get answers to questions about job-related tasks from those outside the workspace, and 12% used it to pose questions to someone at their job.
So here’s where it starts to get a bit more complicated. One thing important to employers is workplace morale. Though 17% say coworker relationships have been strengthened by social media, 16% found something out about a coworker that lowered their opinion of that person. Younger workers were more likely to have found information online that changed how they regarded a coworker.
51% of respondents said their employer has a policy regarding social media at work. You would think that employees might turn away from using it because of this. But 77% used social media at work anyway. Those workplaces that had such a policy did see a 10% drop in overall social media use.
Though 54% said social media helps them to refresh themselves, 56% admitted that it also distracted them from work-related activities. Another 25% said they’d never use the internet at all over the course of a typical day, because they were too busy. While 56% felt social media improved their performance, 22% found that its overall impact was negative. Though allowing social media at work has some advantages, 22% or one-in-five is still a really high number. That loss of productivity, and the capital which it generates, is significant.
Carson Tate is an expert on workplace productivity and the author of the book, Work Simply: Harnessing the Power of Your Personal Productivity Style. She says that for every minute an employer thinks their employee is distracted by social media, they are actually losing 25 minutes of worktime. This can cause high stress and a negative attitude on the part of the employee as he or she tries to catch up.
So what can an employer do to harness the positive aspects of social media in the worksphere, while limiting the impact of negative ones? One way is to set up an intranet. This can connect employees directly, allowing them to ask questions and interact, while preventing them from finding out negative aspects about one another, sounding off about the boss or the company, or wasting time watching cat video after cat video—of which I may, on occasion, be guilty. For that employee who is really active online and has a way with words, recruit them to do your social media management or to write the company blog or e-newsletter. Turn that negative into a positive, and the organization will reap the benefits.
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We know multi-tasking is bad for us: we just can't stop doing it. No matter how many times we hear that multitasking causes heightened mental stress, ruins memory and concentration more than smoking pot, and is literally impossible for our brains to do, we still do it.
“As much as people would like to believe otherwise, humans have finite neural resources that are depleted every time we switch between tasks," The New York Times reports. “That's why you feel tired at the end of the day. You've used them all up."
Multitasking is so pernicious because it doesn't feel like a myth. As Psychology Today explains, “When you multitask 'successfully,' you activate the reward mechanism in your brain which releases dopamine, the happy hormone. This dopamine rush makes you feel so good that you believe you're being effective and further encourages your multitasking habit." At first, multitasking appears to give us an enormous hit of that rush, and “that's why it's so hard to stop multitasking," Psychology Today says, “because you've conditioned your mind and body to feel that thrill."
In reality, multitasking splits our focus and gives us a false sense of accomplishment, making us “suckers for irrelevancy," as Stanford professor Clifford Nass put it in his 2009 study: “Everything distracts." ABC News correspondent Dan Harris concurs, as he told us:
In addition to all those deterrents, Psychology Today reports that multitasking can also “make you overly optimistic which means your [sic] less careful about the work you do and more likely to make mistakes." It also makes “the little information we do take in when we're multitasking more difficult to remember at a later stage." The Stanford research backs that up, with study co-author Eyal Ophir saying multitaskers “couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing. [They] are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds," in a press release.
Those effects seem compounded in college students, since multitasking gave them lower GPAs according to this 2015 Iowa State University study. Neuroscientist and McGill University professor Daniel Levitin explains those myths to us here:
Given all this evidence, it's high time all of us heed the research and embrace monotasking. Monotasking — also known as unitasking or “single tasking," according to The Times — is not the same as mindfulness. Mindfulness cultivates awareness, a focus on the here and now. Monotasking is simply paying attention to, and completing, one task at a time.
If that sounds daunting to you, it can be. But don't worry: you can take baby steps to retrain your brain and reclaim your focus. Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich did just that with these 3 simple steps:
All those changes allowed him to maximize his neural energy and processes in a way that not only got his work done, but got it done faster and better than it did when he was multitasking.
If those steps are difficult for you to do at work, focus on the two biggest attention-busters: email and text messages. Inc recommends, "establishing an e-mail checking schedule" to avoid the temptation to check it every time you get an alert.
“Commit yourself to checking emails only three times a day, (maybe when you get into work in the morning, at lunchtime, and before leaving work at the end of the day)." They also suggest you “turn off texting notifications and choose specific times to check your phone as well" in order to minimize distractions during work.
If social media is your biggest distraction, there are ways to fix that, too. “You can get apps which block your social media (and even your email) except for certain times of the day," Psychology Today says. Here's a list from Mashable to get you started.
Whatever you decide, “make sure that you also take breaks in your unitasking because that's when your brain is at its most effective," Psychology Today says. One of the best things you can do during that break to recharge is meditate. Again, mindfulness is not the same thing as unitasking, but because mindfulness helps you focus on the present, it increases your focusing abilities. Here's Stanford neurosurgeon James Doty breaking down the process step by step:
