Today we discuss some of the brain implications of “always-on” workplaces and lifestyles through a fascinating interview with Maggie Jackson, an award-winning writer and journalist. His latest book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, describes the implications of our busy work and living environment and offers important insights to help us thrive.
Question: New York Times columnist David Brooks said last year that we live in a cognitive age and encouraged readers to be aware of this change and try to adapt to the new reality. Can you explain the cognitive demands of today’s workplaces that didn’t exist 30 or 40 years ago?
Answer: Our workplaces have changed tremendously in the last few decades and it is easy to point to the Blackberry or laptop as the sources of our culture of speed, overload and distraction. But it’s important to note first that our 24/7 fragmented work culture has deeper roots. With early high-tech inventions, such as the cinema, the phonograph, the telegraph, the railroad, and the automobile, radical changes occurred in the human experience of time and space. The distance was broken, long before email and red-eye flights. Telegraph operators, not online daters, experienced the first virtual love affairs, as evidenced by the 1890 novel Wired Love.
Today, the cognitive and physical demands of workers are high. Consider living 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. At great cost to our health, we operate in a rushed and sleepless world, ignoring the signs of the sun and the season, the industrial-age inventions of the weekend and the holidays, and the rhythms of biology. We try to break the chains of time and live like perpetual motion machines. That’s one of the reasons we feel overloaded and stressed – conditions that are corrosive to problem solving and clear thinking.
At the same time, our technologies allow us to access millions of pieces of information, producing a wealth of data that is wonderful and dangerous. Unless we have the will, discipline, and frameworks to turn this information into wisdom, we will remain stuck on the surface of the “knowledge economy.” Today, half of college students cannot judge the objectivity of a website, and only 30 percent of college graduates can read a document as simple as a food label with ease. A third of workers say they are often so busy and interrupted that they don’t have time to reflect on the work they do. I am concerned that we are creating new forms of ignorance, based not on a lack of information, but on an unwillingness or ability to wrest knowledge from the oceans of information around us. Google is not making us stupid. And yet, are we using Google wisely?
Finally, we have developed a very fragmented work style. Taylor was an efficiency guru who taught workers to divide tasks so that each part of a project could go faster. His theories have influenced the world as much as those of Marx or Freud. Today, the average office worker changes tasks every three minutes throughout the day, and nearly half of those interruptions, both external and internal, are self-imposed.
In this new world, we can delight in our ability to move freely around the world, connect with millions of people instantly, and tap into new sources of potential knowledge. Yet all too often, our new ways of working undermine our power of attention. Our fuzzy, hectic, and divided-focus lives undermine our power of attention, leaving us detached, unfocused, and scattered.
Q – What can be the role of spending hours a day in front of a television?
A – Today, we are exposed to much more than television every day. YouTube, movies, animated billboards, devices, by choice and by default envelop us in streams of visual and auditory distractions, information, and advertisements. The average American child is exposed to nearly six hours of non-print media a day. Therefore, determining the specific impact of a single type of medium is difficult in this new mediated world. Still, this environment is sure to mold us and our incredibly plastic brains in ways we can only begin to understand. According to the work of Daniel Anderson at the University of Massachusetts / Amherst, young children exposed to “background television” are more likely to show attention deficits. They play more briefly with toys, show less concentration with their play, and interact less with parents.
As human beings, we are born driven by interruptions. To survive, we must focus on the new stimuli in our environment and be attentive to the changes that surround us. This is why we fall prey to complex, engaging, fast-moving media, at home and at work, and we love them. Especially in the office, if we constantly react to the new, we do nothing more than put out fires and keep our email inbox empty. We are less inclined to grapple with the biggest and messiest problems of the day. Today, we must get back into the driver’s seat of our attention. We need to take charge of our environment and our attention skills, and make up time for reflection, deep problem solving, and creativity. As a top executive once told me, “You can’t think in snippets of sound.”
Q – It seems that a problem is the over-idealization of our culture of the habits of “always active” and “warrior of the road”, which distract from the importance of executive functions such as paying attention to the environment, setting goals and plans, executing about them, measuring results and internalizing learning. How can companies better equip their employees for future success? Can you provide some examples of companies that have positive cultures that encourage and reward employees to put their frontal lobes to good use?
A – As I mentioned earlier, we work and live in ways that undermine our ability to strategize, focus, reflect, and innovate. Skimming, multitasking, and speed have a place in 21st century life. But we cannot let go of the deeper skills of concentration, thought and relationship, or we will create a society of misunderstandings and superficial thoughts.
To create workplaces that foster strategic thinking, deep social connection, and innovation, we must take three steps:
First, question the values that McThinking revere and undermine attention. Recently, my morning paper ran a front-page story about efforts “in an age of impatience” to create a fast-boot computer. “It’s ridiculous to ask people to wait a couple of minutes to start their computer,” explained one technology executive. The first hand in the classroom, the hyperactive businessman or the woman who cannot sit still, much less listen, are icons of success in American society. Still, many of us are beginning to question our adoration for instant gratification and hypermobility.
Second, we must set the stage for individual and collective focus by rewriting our climate of distraction and inattention. To help, some companies and business leaders are experimenting with “blanks” – creating physical spaces or hours on the calendar for uninterrupted, wireless thinking and connection. Executives are scheduling “quiet moments” into their calendars to regain space for reflection. An architect’s design for a major new government laboratory specifically creates spaces for focus and collaboration. IBM’s global practice of “ThinkFridays” began three years ago when software engineers decided to limit e-mail, conference calls and meetings to one day a week to focus on their creative and patent work. Now, different teams and departments interpret “ThinkFridays” in different ways. This pioneering initiative is fluid, flexible and feasible, rather than rigid top-down policies that ban email one day a week.
Finally, if there is only one action we can take to bring about a “rebirth of attention”, it should be to give the gift of our attention to others. Parents and leaders, in particular, need to be role models of care. As contemplative scholar Alan Wallace says, “When we give our attention to another person, we do not get it back. We are paying attention to what seems worthy of our life from moment to moment. Attention, the cultivation of attention, is absolutely fundamental.” .
Q – Neuroscientist Torkel Klinkgerg recently told our readers that “modern life itself can help us become more cognitively capable. And emerging tools can enhance our skills and better prepare us for the demands of the information age.” What are the opportunities and risks you see ahead of us?
A – We now have easy access to vast amounts of data, ever-expanding social media, and limitless experiences across the globe and on the new frontier of cyberspace. The potential for learning, connection and satisfaction is excellent. But at the moment, we are not realizing this potential. And yet I am optimistic. In this time of change, uncertainty, mistrust, and collapse, we may nonetheless be shaken enough to reconsider our ways of thinking and being that we take for granted. We may be ready to make changes. The task before us, awakening a renaissance of attention, is monumental and yet as crucial as greening the planet or rebuilding our financial system.
Copyright (c) 2009 SharpBrains