Maggie Jackson laments workers’ lack of focus.

ESSAY MAGGIE JACKSON

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.
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, evershifting 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.
¶ 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 when they are focused, not when they are scattered and interrupted, a study published in the Harvard Business Review found.
¶ In meetings where everyone is checking e-mail, opportunities for collective creative energy and critical thinking are lost, argues Nathan Zeldes, a senior engineer at Intel and a leader of the nonprofit Information Overload Research Group.
Our age of speed and overload has been building for generations.
But just as we are working toward a green earth, so we can find ways to create what I like to call “planet focus.” What’s needed is a renaissance of attention - a revaluing and cultivating of the art of attention, to help us achieve depth of thought and relations in this complex, hightech time.
The first step is to learn to speak a language of attention. Neuroscientists now consider attention to be a trio of skills: focus, awareness and so-called executive attention. Think of it this way: You can be “aware” that you’re in a beautiful garden and then you can “focus” on an individual flower. The last piece, “executive attention,” is the ability to plan and make decisions.
To combat overload, we also need to look to our environments. That’s why a few pioneering companies are creating places or times for uninterrupted, focused creative thought. “Wisdom is the art of knowing what to overlook,” wrote William James, the father of American psychology research.
And now, we’re beginning to discover what he foretold: that living distracted just isn’t smart.