attention much like your daily allowance
of money is a limited resource and in
any particular moment you can only have
that much of it we live in an age of
constant distractions nine-to-five is
out 24/7 is in with my smartphone in
hand I bring my work with me everywhere
but our devices make us less attentive
having spent 10 years during research in
neurobiology
I wondered what technology does to our
brains I set out to understand the
science of distractions and learn how to
be more focused and boost our
productivity by some measures were
bombarded by more than 63 notifications
a day
we receive over 90 emails and write
about 40 of them on average we switch
tasks every three minutes when we face
distractions two areas of the brain the
parietal cortex and the frontal cortex
are in a sort of tug of war with each
other some research suggests that the
parietal cortex responds to distractions
the frontal cortex which is involved in
cognitively demanding tasks helps us
maintain focus so we get distracted if
the activity of the parietal cortex gets
through to the frontal cortex if the
frontal cortex can keep the parietal in
check you stay focused the brain is
deciding what's important and what's not
and that takes effort even when you're
cleaning your mailbox and you're not
actually doing hard cognitive work you
kind of actually are because there's all
these essentially micro decisions
looking at this email do I need this and
so each of those decision requires a
little bit more of cognitive effort and
so but when you add 2,000 of those you
end up with no no power to make any
other important decisions after that you
feel depleted tell me a little bit about
the study that you did it focused on
email what we found was that checking
email more frequently throughout the day
was associated with feeling more
stressed and overwhelmed in the study
one group of people were asked to check
their email whenever they wanted
throughout the day
while the other group had to do it in
batches we found that people who batched
their emails three to five times a day
felt less stressed and less overwhelmed
why are these tasks that seem really
menial why are they so stressful and
anxiety inducing you're basically doing
something that other people needs let's
imagine that attention is this calm lake
or you know the reflecting pool and then
each notification is a little drop in
that lake we can think of the
reflectiveness is you know the ability
to actually focus on what's going on
around us but when we have all these
drops all the time now you get a
reflecting pool disturbed and frazzled
if email is like rain notifications seem
like a storm to our productivity and our
ability to focus the higher the
cognitive load the more susceptible we
are two new distractions notifications
on our phones draw our attention away
from the task at hand
so completing it may ultimately require
more effort every time you get
distracted by a notification you have to
switch your attention and switch it back
it's switching in and of itself actually
requires cognitive effort and so you end
up more depleted at the end of the day
so what can we do as cell phone users to
mitigate that some things that I do is I
do have scheduled to not disturb times
which you can set on your phone when you
know basically no notifications come in
in general I do keep my phone on silent
I actually am like most people little
addicted to my email and a little
addicted to social media and messages so
I do actually open those apps frequently
enough that I don't need to be reminded
I need to open it every every minute so
to tame new technologies we may first
need to reconsider how and when we rely
on them we did a study not in an
organization but on campus where we
asked students to find a building either
with their phones or without the help of
their phones and yes the students who
relied on their phones got to the
building faster but these same students
actually felt less connected to their
community and so it's not a question of
you know should we just do away with
this devices but what is the price of
this convenient device these social
bonds that hold society together I think
are getting more and more chipped away
from us our devices and apps aren't the
only way to crush it at the office
casual conversations at work could make
us feel more connected happier and
productive that's what science is
telling us
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