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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.
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.
To be honest, I find a pending meeting to be a bit distracting, and kind of find it annoying when people do exactly that. You've already interrupted me to tell me about the meeting (even if electronically), and now I'm going to be distracted thinking about it until it happens. May as well just ask your question now and get it over with the way I see it.
Different things for different folks I guess.
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?
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 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
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
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.
You'd drive me insane. I don't mind a quick drop by. It frees you up if you're blocked, allows for some human interaction, and if I'm too busy I'll just say no. Now put a meeting on my calendar and the 15-20 minutes before it is totally lost, as I avoid starting anything anticipating the meeting. Just come and talk to me.
Not to mention that unless you have a good rapport with your manager a 1:1 is a huge cause of stress. Its a "oh shit, what' the matter now" issue, especially if a non-regular one appears on my calendar.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
You're doing it wrong. You are abusing the concept of multiple tabs as a history and/or bookmarks bar and/or todo-list.
If you're really interested in keeping some pages around for a longer time than a couple of hours, just bookmark the fuckers. Or copy-paste the link onto your todo-list. Keeping a shitload of tabs open is a terrible way of maintaining a 'to read' or 'to process' list. I used to do exactly that, but stopped doing it when I lost my set of opened tabs one time too many due to some crash (and spending ten minutes finding and reopening the tabs from the history - yes, that is retarded). Remember, the only information you need is the URL. One line. Yet you spend 80MB, valuable screen estate and tab switching space, just to be reminded of that one simple string.
For things you visit daily or regularly: Speed dial extension
For branching information searches: Use one source Google tab, middle mouse click the stuff you need for the task at hand. Look at all the opened tabs and close the useless ones. If the query needs to be tweaked, repeat process. If the task is finished: clean up after yourself.
Things you want to look at in the coming days: URL on your todo-list. They're clickable in pretty much everything around nowadays anyway. Also: ALT+D, CTRL+C, ALT+Tab, CTRL+V, ALT+Tab. The advantage of using this approach versus bookmarking is that you have to actually plan to look at whatever it is and learn really fast to just get it over with or decide that it isn't interesting enough to spend time on anyway. This instead of creating yet another pile of shit (bookmarks) you're gonna plow through at some point in time (which is: never).
Things you need first thing tomorrow or actually go back to regularly during the day: Fine, leave those open.
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
Me either...