Why It's So Hard to Focus at Work (Hint: It's not you, it's your workplace)

It's getting harder to focus every day

I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write this. If I didn’t force myself to focus I would easily get distracted by something after few minutes. Even when I’m doing things that I’ve been waiting to do it, I still feel the urge to do something else. I don’t know how and when this happened. During the last few years I was always studying, working, and doing open source. And actually got stuff done. Doing all of those at the same time requires paying attention to what I wanted to do and ignore the noise.

Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus

Research has shed light on the power of focus and its role as a hidden driver of success. Yet as helpful as focus can be, research also shows there’s a downside to it: excessive focus exhausts the focus circuits in your brain. It can drain your energy, make you lose self-control, impair your decision-making, and make you less collaborative. The brain operates optimally when it toggles between focus and unfocus. When you unfocus, you engage a brain circuit called the default mode network (DMN). The DMN activates old memories, goes back and forth between the past, present, and future, and recombines different ideas. Using this new and previously inaccessible data, you can imagine creative solutions or predict the future, and more. There are many simple and effective ways to activate this circuit in the course of a day, such as positive constructive daydreaming, napping, and consciously thinking from another person’s perspective.

How to reclaim your attention from the distraction economy | Psyche Videos

Could you watch this video on full screen, 1x speed, with no distractions? Here are five steps to rebuild your attention span

Overcoming information overload with circular attention economies - Cosmik Labs

Don't Get Distracted

I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.

Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy

The attention economy is the economic system in which human attention is the scarce resource. This literature takes a particular passage in Herbert Simon’s seminal Chapter Designing Organization fo...

Why you feel busy all the time (when you’re actually not)

Overwhelmed? It can seem like we’re busier than ever, but that’s not quite true, says Oliver Burkeman.

Less stress, more productivity: why working fewer hours is better for you and your employer

There’s always too much work to be done on software projects, too many features to implement, too many bugs to fix. Some days you’re just not going through the backlog fast enough, you’re not producing enough code, and it’s taking too long to fix a seemingly-impossible bug. And to make things worse you’re wasting time in pointless meetings instead of getting work done. Once it gets bad enough you can find yourself always scrambling, working overtime just to keep up. Pretty soon it’s just expected, and you need to be available to answer emails at all hours even when there are no emergencies. You’re tired and burnt out and there’s still just as much work as before. The real solution is not working even harder or even longer, but rather the complete opposite: working fewer hours.

The Right to Concentrate

In this paper, we clarify the nature and the scope of the right to concentrate. We argue that a right to concentrate constitutes a right against significant, non-consensual interference with a person’s concentration-requiring task. An agent has a right to concentrate when others have a duty not to intentionally or negligently distract her from her performance of a task that requires concentration when concentrating on the task is in the fundamental interests of the agent in question. We analyse the protection of the right to concentrate through different roles in concentration spaces, environments in which concentration-requiring tasks are protected through the governance of impermissible distractions and through norms regulating the access to and the use of such environments. This analysis helps us understand the relevant rights and duties in situations where an agent’s concentration on a task is in her fundamental interests.

Companies Are Being Torn Apart by AI "Workslop," Stanford Research Finds

Not only is AI hampering productivity, but it's also blowing up collaboration and souring employee dynamics.

AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It

One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consistently intensify it: In the study, employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. That may sound like a win, but it’s not quite so simple. These changes can be unsustainable, leading to workload creep, cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making. The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems. To correct for this, companies need to adopt an “AI practice,” or a set of norms and standards around AI use that can include intentional pauses, sequencing work, and adding more human grounding.

The lost art of concentration: being distracted in a digital world

We check our phones every 12 minutes, often just after waking up. Always-on behaviour is harmful to long-term mental health, and we need to learn to the hit the pause button

The attention market—and what is wrong with it

Attention is described as a “scarce commodity” that is traded in “a marketplace.” This, it is further claimed, contributes to a “widespread sense of attentional crisis.” But is there really an attention market, and if so, what, if anything, is wrong with it? We defend the claim that there are markets in attention. We provide an account of such attention markets and use that account to address what is morally wrong with them. Our account draws on knowledge of how attention works and what roles it plays in the mind. The attention market trades in an ability to influence our attention – somewhat (though not exactly) like the labor market trades in an ability to influence how we use our capacity for work. Specifically, the commodity it trades in is attentional landscaping potential, viz. the ability to systematically influence patterns of attention by changes to the sensory environment individuals are exposed to. Attention markets thus, we argue, commodify influence over a human capacity that plays a central role in shaping individual experience, agency, and belief formation. This feature of attention markets makes them ethically problematic. As markets in access to external influence, attention markets pose a special threat to individual autonomy and escape the classical liberal defense of free markets. Those who value autonomy should worry about the attention markets that exist today.

Because coordination is expensive

If you’ve ever worked at a larger organization, stop me if you’ve heard (or asked!) any of these questions: “Why do we move so slowly as an organization? We need to figure out how…

AI Is Forcing Employees to Work Harder Than Ever

Another new study adds to the understanding that AI is actually making work more demanding for employees instead of making it easier.

The Psychology of a Billion-Dollar Enterprise App: Why Is Slack So Habit-Forming?

Slack isn’t just another office collaboration app. The company has been called, “the fastest-growing workplace software ever.” Recent press…