Focused Work: Regaining Attention in Hurried Workspaces

If you don’t pay attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.

David Allen

References

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[3] Mark, G. (2023). Attention span: Finding focus for a fulfilling life. William Collins.

[4] Rudolph, C. W., Katz, I. M., Lavigne, K. N., & Zacher, H. (2017). Job crafting: A meta-analysis of relationships with individual differences, job characteristics, and work outcomes. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 102, 112-138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2017.05.008

[5] Lee, S. Y., & Brand, J. L. (2005). Effects of control over office workspace on perceptions of the work environment and work outcomes. Journal of environmental psychology, 25(3), 323-333. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2005.08.001

[6] Lee, S. Y., & Brand, J. L. (2010). Can personal control over the physical environment ease distractions in office workplaces? Ergonomics, 53(3), 324-335. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140130903389019

[7] Mark, G., Iqbal, S. T., Czerwinski, M., Johns, P., Sano, A., & Lutchyn, Y. (2016, May). Email duration, batching and self-interruption: Patterns of email use on productivity and stress. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1717-1728). https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858262

[8] Wijngaards, I., Pronk, F. R., & Burger, M. J. (2022). For whom and under what circumstances does email message batching work? Internet Interventions, 27, 100494. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.invent.2022.100494

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[14] Taylor, W. C., King, K. E., Shegog, R., Paxton, R. J., Evans-Hudnall, G. L., Rempel, D. M., ... & Yancey, A. K. (2013). Booster Breaks in the workplace: participants’ perspectives on health-promoting work breaks. Health education research, 28(3), 414-425. https://doi.org/10.1093/her/cyt001

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Focused Work: Why It Matters

An average person spends about a third of their life at work – approximately 90,000 hours of our lives are spent working. Many of us yearn for meaningful work. But not every task or responsibility we engage in is necessarily enjoyable or fulfilling. We might instead find ourselves constantly rushed and distracted. The distractions brought about by our tendency to multi-task, technology, and colleagues mean that our attention is scattered across a variety of work tasks throughout the day. A distracted mind leads to a lowered sense of personal efficacy and accomplishment, ultimately diminishing the sense of meaningfulness of our work. One survey of Australian employees shows that on average, workers spend 31 hours a month in unproductive meetings, 8.8 hours per week responding to emails, and 2 hours a day recovering from distractions [1]. Another survey of US employees found that 79% of workers were not able to get through an entire hour without being distracted, with more than half citing phone notifications and chatty colleagues as primary sources of distraction [2]. Researcher Gloria Mark, author of Attention Span, notes from her research how our decreasing attention spans – previously 75 seconds two decades ago to, now just 47 seconds, have made it impossible to focus on what truly matters and be productive in the modern workspace [3]. The inability to channel our most basic of cognitive processes – our attention, makes it difficult, if not impossible, to see the meaning of the work we do.

Creating Mental Spaces that Safeguard Attention and Enhance Productivity

In a previous article, we offered ways to design your work through job crafting. Job crafting involves adjusting the autonomy, variety, and opportunities for professional development, while also seeking social support, feedback, and coaching. Research indicates that altering these aspects and facets of one’s work role can promote positive work attitudes and enhance job performance [4]. But what about our moment-to-moment work experiences? In a work environment plagued with constant distractions, how could we carve out the cognitive and emotional space to do our best work? Ideas of focused work have been presented in books such as Cal Newport’s Deep Work and Slow Productivity, as well as Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus. Central to many of the suggestions from these books is that we can regain focus by asserting greater control over our work environments. The authors’ recommendations are consistent with research showing how greater personal control over one’s physical workspaces enhances job satisfaction [5] and increases perceptions of productivity [6]. For knowledge workers, here are some evidence-backed ways to regain and re-establish focus at work:

• Reassert control over your work environment. Are your phone notifications, beeps and alerts from your emails or ‘productivity’ software (such as Microsoft Teams or Slack) fragmenting your attention? Identifying and limiting notifications from these devices is a good first step toward re-establishing agency over your workspace. Emails are another ubiquitous distractor, so one way to limit their effects on your attention is to batch-process them. That is, instead of treating emails as text messages that need to be responded to immediately, schedule intermittent times over the day to respond to them [7]. A recent study shows that batch-processing emails can reduce emotional exhaustion and can be particularly effective for employees dealing with a high number of emails – more so if the organization does not require nor expect employees to respond immediately to the emails they receive [8]. Doing so for productivity software – checking in on notifications only intermittently, frees up blocks of time you can use – and need, for deep, concentrated work. Creating environments of auditory privacy is another way to carve out space for focused work. A recent study showed that while noise-cancelling headphones did not affect employee cognitive performance, they did help reduce feelings of annoyance brought about by distracting overheard conversations in open-plan office environments. This led to an increased ability to concentrate and a higher sense of privacy – both of which are essential for undisturbed, productive office work [9].

• Use time-boxing. A popular productivity tip is ‘time-boxing,’ which involves converting your to-do’s into chunks of time, scheduling them, and then committing to completing the task within the time block you have allocated for it [10]. Time-boxing works because it checks off two qualities needed for focused work. First, this approach channels your attention to one task per block of time – a singular focus on a task instead of being constantly distracted by several all at once. We know from numerous studies that productivity declines when we multi-task. Juggling between multiple tasks, as one group of researchers state, gives the “illusion of productivity at the expense of performance effectiveness” [11]. Second, time-boxing requires you to cleanly switch from one task to the next, removing what researchers call ‘attention residue.’ With a strict time block for a task and placing a ‘hard stop’ on it, you will be able to transition to the next task without the carryover effect of your thoughts still lingering on the previous one [12]. Of course, time-boxing requires practice – particularly when it comes to estimating the amount of time needed on a task. With time, however, you will be better able to estimate and then allocate the amount of time needed for a task and be less prone to the planning fallacy (the tendency to underestimate the amount of time needed for a task).

• Schedule booster breaks. Productivity is a marathon, not a sprint. One additional recommendation to boost your productivity is to schedule breaks. While the modern workspace may celebrate constant busyness, research evidence instead points to the value of scheduling breaks for performance. One review showed that breaks boost energy levels, reduce fatigue and, importantly, enhance overall performance when individuals resume their work [13]. Not all breaks are created equally. Research on ‘booster breaks’ – pairing breaks with physical activity, is one of the most effective in countering the effects of a sedentary lifestyle and promoting positive work outcomes [14]. Taking a short walk around a nearby park (or anywhere close to nature), paired with engaging in friendly conversation with a colleague over a 15-minute physical activity has been shown to reduce stress and enhance collegiality. These booster breaks also have a positive spillover effect, encouraging employees to form healthy habits outside of work [15]. A booster break in nature may even have some attention-restoration effects, with some other studies showing that individuals perform better on attention performance after spending just a 10-minute walk in nature [16].

Enhancing our productivity depends a little less on time than it does another aspect of our experience – our attention. Far too often, we allow our attention to be pulled away, fragmented across different demands across our work day and not allow space to reclaim how we ‘spend’ our attention. We end up feeling frazzled but unfulfilled; tasks remain incomplete despite the hours we put into them. Fortunately, we have ways to reclaim our attention, allowing us the opportunity to reassert greater agency over our time. Which of the three evidence-backed approaches might you try to refocus your attention for greater productivity?

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