Slashdot Mirror
Technology and Ever-Falling Attention Spans
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC has an article about technology's effect on concentration in the workplace. They note research finding that the average information worker's attention span has dropped significantly in only a few years. "Back in 2004 we followed American information workers around with stopwatches and timed every action. They switched their attention every three minutes on average. In 2012, we found that the time spent on one computer screen before switching to another computer screen was one minute 15 seconds. By the summer of 2014 it was an average of 59.5 seconds." Many groups are now researching ways to keep people in states of focus and concentration. An app ecosystem is popping up to support that as well, from activity timing techniques to background noise that minimizes distractions. Recent studies are even showing that walking slowly on a treadmill while you work can have positive effects on focus and productivity. What tricks do you use to keep yourself on task?
It sounds stupid, but it works for me. When I really want to concentrate on one thing, I kill everything else. Any browser tabs I have open that don't relate to what I'm doing, my email client, remenants of other stuff I've been working on lately. Sometimes I throw my ear buds in but have no music playing (they do a good job at passive noise cancelling). I also clear off my physical desk. I'm pretty keen on scribbling notes while I work.. so my desk is usually full of sheets of graph paper. Sounds lame, but starting with a fresh slate has a focusing effect on me.
Note that this is only when I explicitly decide I really want to have all my concentration on something difficult. Most of the time I've got dozens of unrelated things open, several emails an hour about stuff not even remotely relevant to me, and the usual office background chatter (some of which I enjoy and contribute to) yet still manage just fine. To be honest, I don't think I'd want to work in the kind of sterile intently focused and completely silent environment that some of our more introverted slashdoters crave. It might be more efficient, but it's no way to live.
My gut reaction to the articles points on ones favorite music being distracting is to call BS. Stuff I've heard dozens of times works as background music regardless. I tend to just leave my music on random throughout the day, and despite having a nice mixture of classic and progressive rock, metal, and even some chiptune stuff, you could probably stop me at any point and I wouldn't be able to tell you what I was just listening to. I actually just tried it and yup.. no idea without looking (it was Silent Lucidity by Queensryche, which is reasonably distinctive).
>> What tricks do you use to keep yourself on task?
None - I'm a frequent commenter on SlashDot.
Post
I got distracted.
What tricks do you use to keep yourself on task?
Until few days ago i used to not have a Slashdot account...
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
I just simply don't believe that ... oooh, shiny ... oh, gotta do my timesheets, it's Friday.
What was I saying?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I have experienced this myself and have done some things to combat it.
1) Encourage quick meetings on the calendar rather than drop by's. I rarely drop by my staff to ask a "quick question" that will interrupt their train of thought. Instead I do frequent 1:1's by appointment, often 10-15 minutes to go through everything we need to share with each other. Meatier topics take more time, but I want my developers focused on their tasks.
2) Check email in scheduled slots
3) I don't answer my damn phone unless it is someone I know.
4) Check Slashdot every 15 minutes (wait, what)
Sorry, the summary of the article was TL;DR.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
In their ass?
"Get the fuck away from me!" (runs away)
"Clearly this man has no attention span."
First Post!
I didn't have the patience to see if anybody else already posted any comments -- the summary itself was TL;DR -- so my claim of "First Post!" may not be accurate.
dr
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They switched their attention every three minutes on average. In 2012, we found that the time spent on one computer screen before switching to another computer screen was one minute 15 seconds. By the summer of 2014 it was an average of 59.5 seconds.
I know my average has plummeted over the years; especially when I bought a second display, and then a third.
Fortunately, this year I may replace them all with a large 4k display and then I'll have a long attention span again.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Digital Native Disease. I hear it's an incurable, fatal condition.
What tricks do you use to keep yourself on task?
My job requires being a multi ....tasker (I had to.....check my facebook .....twitter ......Yahoo!.....finance...and if I'm not ...detail...oriental....email..I'll get fried.
It's a sham that I can't get it.....up, but eventually this .....erection will go up and we'll have our new building. Anyway, I have to log off now. I'm told that I cannot spend .....time on reddit.
Yes, Mom, I am making sure I am changing pages before typing...oh, please! Give it to me you slut! Yeah baby! yeah! And more more! More ....buy 100 SDRL at market ....slut! Spank me! Spank me! .....Wait?! Oh shit!
Once people realized you were timing them, they started to do everything quicker because they thought it would make themselves look good.
I am loving reading all these responses explaining how people avoid distractions, even while succumbing to the distraction of posting on reading and posting on Slashdot.
(Yeah yeah, I know, maybe they're in a different time zone... I would bet money the majority are still in their working hours. Including myself.)
This would have been a first post, but there was something that popped up on another screen, and I got two texts and a voice mail before I could hit submit.
time spent on one computer screen before switching to another computer screen
This might measure switching your attention from one screen to another, but that is not the same as switching your attention from one task to another.
This is another one of those "we need empirical data to prove what everyone already knows", like studies on the differences between men and women, how peoples behaviors are affected by wealth, etc;
We can chalk it up in the "no shit sherlock" category.
FTFA:
This is perhaps because there is relatively little research available about the impact of websites like Twitter and Facebook, or games like Candy Crush, that seem to be deliberately aimed at keeping us constantly engaged, to the detriment of work.
I have to don my tinfoil cap now and surmise that in all liklihood, it isn't in the best interest of Google, Facebook, Apple or the rest to point out that yes, using our "products" and living this fast and loose, jittered-stimmed out existence of tweets, posts, statuses, etc isn't in your best interest, even if your best excuse is the usual "but this is how I stay current with my family"
What we are creating ladies and gentlemen is a generation of people who will HAVE TO HAVE computers and AI run things for them, because their attention span and critical thinking will be in the toilet.
Removing my tinfoil cap...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Ritalin. Does the trick for me. I started taking it at about 40 yo and it made a world of difference in my ability to pay attention to things; and therefore, to hold jobs much much better.
Haven't we all heard our mom's yell this at us?
How many people actually have any appreciable time away from technology in any given day anymore?
Our cars have radios, touch screens, navigation, and are interactive and immediately present when we sit down.
Our homes are filled with tablets, desktops, phones, and TVs with DVRs--so no more waiting through commercials even--we get *exactly* the stimulus we want *now* when we want it.
Seems we just inundate ourselves with stimulus.
Challenge: walk outside and sit on a park bench for 20 minutes a day with no batteries in sight. I bet it would help reset our internal patience reserves. Can you do it without squirming?
This whole thing reads like some dystopian society's instruction manual. "hmmm these workers aren't focusing fast enough according to our stop watches, lets play droning sounds and make them walk on treadmills, maybe pump them full of drugs to keep those meat machines operating at peak efficiency until they burn out and can be replaced." Kill me now if this is our future.
I use one window to log into slashdot and keep it always in focus and on-top, and maximized so that it gets 100% of my attention. The other window is for distracting things like hacking out code, building, running test cases, updating rally etc etc. My attention span to slashdot has increased to nearly 30 minutes now.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
An app ecosystem is popping up to support that
There's just something wrong with that statement in regard to "increasing focus" and "decreasing distractions". I'm having trouble putting my finger on just what seems off to me...
'Nuff said. The folks able to keep up with rapid attention shifts will survive. Those who take longer? They'll die sooner and breed less. Pretty soon, we'll "evolve" to the point where we'll al ride around in personal mobility units with our view of the real world is through a single sensor protruding in front of us, after which it'll be a short step to fully enclosed climate controlled pods.
Then, when our evolutionary perfection is achieved, we can crush The Doctor and destroy all other imperfect sentient beings in the universe.
That is all.
It's a bit long to follow.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
thats the trick i use
I've found that listening to music can help. If my brain needs to switch focus for a second, it can listen to the music for a few seconds and then go right back to the task at hand. What kind of music works best varies from person to person and even day to day. Some days, I need slow songs to help calm me down. Other days, I need a more "active" song to boost my adrenaline.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
What tricks do you use to keep yourself on task?
I know that this trick isn't possible for everybody, but I find that actually working on something interesting leads to far fewer distractions. When I'm working on something I like, I don't care when a new email arrives and I don't have any interest in hitting Slashdot. (I am not working on something interesting at the moment.) Difficult work (either mentally or physically) also seems to makes it harder to get distracted.
Maybe people's jobs are just getting more boring and cluttered with seemingly worthless tasks.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Why, I was looking at some researchers the other day, and they kept switching tasks 4 times per minute. First they're playing with their watch, then they get distracted by all the interesting stuff I'm doing, then they're back to playing with their watch, then they're writing something down. Maybe if they stayed focused they could write more than one line per minute!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Just maybe, a task that took three minutes on a computer in 2004 now only takes 59 seconds? Nah.
My biggest distractions come from external sources on Skype and email. If I really want to get something done, I turn those off, block off my calendar, and hide the best I can. Even better if I can do that from my office at home, rather than the wonderful 'open office' I have at work.
Here's a radical thought. If you want your information workers to stop abruptly switching tasks, STOP FORCING THEM TO ABRUPTLY SWITCH TASKS.
You know, by hiring more people maybe?
Talking out both sides of your ass does make this problem go away, moron executives! The problem is that you have tech workers doing the work of 3 or more people now days. You know, your "AAA+ talent" that you are so addicted to, that is able to somewhat pull this off, despite scientific data showing that multitasking is precisely something that humans ARE NOT ABLE TO DO.
Here, since I know you CEO types are biased against anything that doesn't fixate on money as the ultimate goal, here's an article from Forbes on that very subject (even though a peer reviewed journal would be a better link.)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/douglasmerrill/2012/08/17/why-multitasking-doesnt-work/
What does this mean, you ask? Your "Cost savings plans" by axeing employees and replacing them with "AAA+ talent" that can do the work of 3 other people (which they really cant, as per the article, and the research it is based on) is a boondoggle. Yes, A boondoggle. That's why you are now backpedaling, and trying to find ways to get your ADHD AAA+ talent to focus on individual tasks.
Just suck it up, and hire more people, who can actually do the jobs you tried to liquidate and do it right-- ok? Stop trying to play all smartypants and trying to artificially lower information worker wages across the board with H1B visa workers by exploiting the shit out of that system for financial gain-- That's a boondoggle too. (You know, you guys seem to have a hard time telling legitimately good strategies from boondoggles. Maybe you arent as good as you think you are?)
Seriously-- Own up to the mistake. Axing 2/3 of your information workforce was a bad idea. Just own it. Hire people back, and treat them good. Give them sensible workloads and sensible deadlines. They will be allowed to focus on their work, and they will preferrentially do so, unless they are ADHD tweakers who constantly twitch between tasks because of a genuine mental issue. You have to spend money to make money. Embrace that old axiom. That's how you fix this problem.
"we found that the time spent on one computer screen before switching to another computer screen"
How is that a good metric. Switching screen or application doesn't mean they're not working the same problem. I know a lot of my work involves looking at 3 or 4 apps (which may be on the same or another screen depending on workflow) just to complete the current task.
I can't bring myself to close tabs.
I tend to let tabs accumulate unless I need the resources. Restart the browser in a few days. The cost of searching for the right information again is generally higher than the cost of leaving the tab open.
I do wonder what percentage of this has to do with the age of the person involved. I find geeks in their 20s tend to read less for fun when compared to geeks in their 40s, with geeks in their 30s may or may not. Reading requires a longer attention span and *may* have some correlation with context-switching habits. I am also curious about context-switching costs, which as I understand it tend to be ridiculously high for humans.
Oh don't know, but if I could, you know, work through a ticket to completion without interruption, that would be great!
* Boss promotes too many tickets at once to the same priority. Meaning you work 3,4,5 or more tasks at the same time with similar time tables.
* People with tickets given a lower priority IM you again and again, and you keep telling them they are a priority 2 or 3... And until all the p0 and p1's are gone, you'll never even get a chance to look at it. Take it up with the boss if you want a higher priority.
* Dev and QA email threads you don't need to be on (yet, maybe) spamming your inbox. But you need to check if they actually are asking you something now, so you stop to read it.
* Walk ups. - Same as IM.
Let people focus on a task and get it done. If they get blocked, let them tell you they are blocked, and they can move onto another task until the first one becomes unblocked. It really can be that simple, if people will let it.
This sig intentionally left blank.
I find the study unbelievable because they did not consider. I see small kitten outside. So cute. Anyway, like I was saying they did not consider that some distractions are positive and some negative.
How can I focus on browsing /. with a limited attention span?
love is just extroverted narcissism
(Disclaimer: I'm the guy with 6 browser tabs open right now who _should_ be finishing something.)
I think that in the workplace, simple demand on knowledge workers' time is the reason for loss of focus. Fewer and fewer people are being hired to do things, and at the same time more things are being asked of the remaining individuals. I often find it hard to sit and actually solve a problem completely unless people leave me alone and let me work on the one or two hard problems. The thing that does keep me motivated is this -- now that I have children, I can't just spend forever getting things done at work. Once time is up, I need to head out and take care of family stuff. 10 years ago, I could stay an extra hour or two if I got stuck on something. Now, it's tough to even pull out the laptop after they go to bed, so I'm very motivated to do work at work. This keeps me out of most of the time-sinks -- Slashdot is not one of them though. :-) If I were 20-something, had no kids and nothing going on outside of work, I'd probably just work the 12-hour days that Google or other companies like it enable for their workers by providing free food, etc.
As far as society in general, anecdotal evidence seems to point to smart phones and social media as big distractions. I'm kind of in between on this -- I like my phone, but I also have the patience to, say, sit and wait for the train without constantly messing with it. A lot of people can't do that or don't want to. I've seen more than a couple of people bump into light poles on train station platforms because their noses were stuck in their phones. I still have enough patience to use most of my downtime to think about solutions to work problems, or just stare into space and think. But if I was a Facebook-addicted kid or Millennial, that might be harder to do.
As technology has become ever present in the workplace, we have become repetitive multitaskers. The organization I work in has people doing simple, repetitive tasks, over and over and over again; often they are not related to each other. For instance, our auditing team doesn't just have to audit documents, they have to create a folder on this drive, copy a document from that drive, email a copy to this person, cc that person. Technology is cultivating the behavior; but it isn't the root of the problem.
Just quit emailing, IMing, phoning, txting, and calling impromptu meetings and my productivity will skyrocket.
And now /. has given me a chance to vent on my late lunch. :)
Sinkholed (www\.)?reddit\.com to loopback IP. No worries since.
Ooouw Shiny!!
"The BBC has an article about technology's effect on concentration in the workplace.".... tl;dr
I know it may sound absurd, but whe I have a really important synthesis to prepare, be it the mail-to-CEO, strategy-in-six-slide-for-the-team, last-time-to-convince-this-guy I start it with a pencil on paper. ;-) but I almost never come back to it))
How many points, in which order, oh I need to mention that there, no, earlier
And when my draft has become reasonably illegible, I can trash it and start typing, I know exactly what to do.
((in fact, to be honest, Idon't trash the paper before I'm done typing
Herve S.
Tried to read the summary three times. But, it was just a bit long winded.
Like how i didn't bother reading more than the title and the first line of this submission.
The break on attention is due to sensationalist garbage pretending to pass as news or information relevant or truthful.
If the typical trend is attention grabbing junk passing as relevant articles one should read instead of "newstisements" or royal babies etc, i think the "ever-falling attention span" is quite a healthy indication of ones psychological defense and, there's nothing to worry about.
Since it shows how the majority still have some mental defenses against these types of brainwashing/distracting/useless/spams lumps of information from "think tanks" hacks in political/news areas to some tech/"science" article on *pick a website* pretending to be relevant enough to be read and thought through.
I started keeping real time time tracking in Excel, and then moved to a combination of TimeDoctor and Trello. It didn't take too many weeks to realize that rapid thrash between tasks was synonymus to stressful days (for me). On advice from a friend, I try to schedule two time blocks a day to be heads-down on one topic per. It seems to help.
The assumption of the experimenters seems to be that nothing in the environment or the jobs has changed in ten years.
The "experts" have focused on squeezing blood out of a turnip or cracking the whip over the decades, but they don't know human nature nor do they show much evidence of catering to well-being (which would have a positive effect on productivity). Everyone has his own particular psychology and ecosystem. My office is like a sensory deprivation chamber -- no natural light, no noise (except the occasional cell block-like clang down the hallway when someone shuts his door. The sheer lack of stimulation in a small cube-shaped space -- as with ~200 pound mammals in old-fashioned zoos -- causes its own pacing back and forth. Evidently human experiments showed that after a certain time people actually begin to hallucinate, given lack of (diverse) sensory input. The senses (plural) evolved for millions of years to hunt for food and avoid danger. Real-time information processing, environmental interaction. Not sitting in a cell, staring at a screen.
Interesting in our modern society is that we have a plethora of terms describing short attention spans, but not nearly as many for a overly-long or poorly directed attention spans. These scenarios, which I've seen occur more frequently over the years, are llikewise responsible for loss of productivity. People focusing obsessively on minutiae, rabbit holes, constantly refactoring, not sticking to an 80/20 or 90/10 rule, etc. The modern office has no evolutionary basis in primate history.
Anyway, this guy summed it up tongue-in-cheek as ADD: Ambition Deficit Disorder: http://www.examiner.com/articl.... It turns out that there are not sufficient rewards in most large organization for hard work.
If you're using a form-based application that pops up a new form for each segment of data entry vs. a tab-based interface that switches panels for each segment of data entry, are you "changing screens"?
The reason I ask is that I've noticed in increase in the number of form-based applications with the advent of the smart phone interface. People don't want to have to tap a tab/button at the top or side of the screen to move to the next segment as had been convenient to do with a mouse. So the "screens" have gotten less complex and increased in number to perform the same task.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This is very apropos (assuming that's the right URL; I can't test this at work).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
A good night's sleep, frequent breaks, and rest periods. Whenever I switch to a new task, I methodically clean up after the last one - close terminals, browser tabs, diagnostic programs, everything. Sometimes interruptions are avoidable, and I have to open a ticket for something, but I make the quickest note possible so I can get back to my task right away.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
FTA, > Being surrounded by noisy co-workers and office machinery probably doesn't help either
How about the demands? Interruptions, "hey can you do this too", "we need you for [meeting/explanation/event]" and all the constant "This is now also on your plate, deal with it.", which appending "whenever" doesn't make much better re: attention span.
It's not even the most painful of iterations among the increasing expectations of workers.
When I'm working at work or at home, sometimes there are constant distractions (boss/co-workers/wife asking questions, kids yelling, phone). And it keeps pulling you out of the zone. Once I actually worked at a table in a busy mall. Put on some music, and get to work. It was actually great. Even though there were constant noises and potential distractions - you knew that NONE of them were important or required your attention. When at work and home, you're always slightly attuned to noises/etc in your environment, and they provide a series of constant distractions. You have to get to a place where you know nothing but your work requires your attention. My wife knows how distractions disrupt concentration, yet always interrupts me to ask a questions, tell me something that's on TV, etc - then regrets it because she knows what she's done and blown about 15 minutes of getting back in the zone. But later on, she'll do it again... It's a vicious cycle.
Constant interruption at work is not just a technology problem - it's also a people problem.
At work, I have four monitors. This enables me to multitask very easily - I have several IM conversations (with coworkers), two web browser windows, e-mail, and a handful of shells open at any given time. Chances are, I'm bouncing around among these as time permits - the 30 seconds spent compiling my code are an excellent time to catch up on e-mail. This is the technology problem.
However, the people problem is that I work in an open-plan office, and my fellow coworkers are allowed, if not encouraged, to just walk up to me and ask to do something. This is interruptive by nature - I am not explicitly doing anything to switch my focus. Several weeks ago I tallied the number of walk-up interruptions I got in one day (28), phone calls (3), and IM conversations (9) I had to respond to in basically real time. The overhead of this context switching is non-negligible.
Claiming that technology is the only problem is only half, or perhaps even less than half, of the solution.
I used to work in an office that had 10-12 people crammed into the space about the size of 2 parking spots.
In the morning, it took about an hour for people to arrive, greet each other, catching up on email and get settled in, before everyone was heads down into a productive mode. Then after an hour, some clown (never quite figured out what his role was) would come in and wind everyone up and it would be lunchtime before people got into a productive mode again. The afternoon was pretty much the same.
Hearing stories of these humongous rooms with thousands of people sitting side by side, sounds like an incredibly cheap yet unproductve environment.
Search "facebook open office plan" and the first five articles pretty much say the same thing.
Cheap and Uproductive.
I don't see how they controlled for equipment getting faster. A computer in 2004 was probably a ~3Ghz Pentium 4 with a 800MHz bus and 1Gb of RAM. Now you have an i5 or i7 with an SSD that's probably 10 times faster. People just don't wait that long for their computer anymore.
(I miss the good old days when a print job got you a 15-20 minute break.)
What, me worry?
This stuff was designed to leave us autistic and narcissistic instead of awake to the realities of the world, we will one day be reminiscing about the 20th century, for the few who pick it up and can go programmer the rest mentally damaged by it are derping away waiting for manufacturing machinery that will never come.
Pills...
There's more to this problem than just attention span (time before switching attention). One of the biggest problems, and one that has been insufficiently researched to date, is the declining quality of attention - it's getting shallower for most of us, so we take in less and less of what we are supposedly attending to. This affects the quality of our output at least as much as short attention span.
There's an old teaching joke that goes "the students' attention span is just the time it takes for the teacher to realise they weren't paying attention from the start."
Idiocracy. Stupid people who have ceded their lives to tech and are dumber for it, while the oligarchs or technocrats tell them who to vote for so that the gravy train keeps rolling on until the house of cards just collapses under its own weight.
Pen, paper, and the Emergent Task Planner
I focus on three core things I need to accomplish each day, and deal with other things as they arise. But working with just three simple tasks has made me much more productive and focused. It seems simple or too small, but it really keeps my productivity level higher than when I was scattered and constantly switching tasks and not really making any real progress with any of them.
http://davidseah.com/node/the-emergent-task-planner/
I get myself into a comfortable chair then I SQUIRREL!!