Most office workers can't go 30 minutes or less without getting distracted. — Getty Images/The New York Times
The good news: It’s not just you unable to home in on work tasks during your 9-to-5. The bad news: No one in the office is able to focus anymore.
The vast majority of US employees are unable to stay focused on daily tasks, according to “Lost Focus: The Cost Of Distractions On Productivity In The Modern Workplace,” a report from workplace and productivity analytics platform Insightful. Of 1,200 US employees and employers, 79% of workers said they can’t go a full hour without getting distracted from work; 59% couldn’t go just 30 minutes without encountering a diversion.
There’s a confluence of factors hindering employees from hunkering down to check off to-do list items. While the allure of smartphones is an obvious contributor – 62% of respondents cited phone notifications as a main source of distraction – the biggest offender in distracting employees was actually other employees. Over 70% of respondents said people interrupting their work was the biggest contributor to tasks not getting done, a potential symptom of workplace ‘yapping’ led by sociable Gen Z workers.
Apps like Microsoft Teams and Slack, along with email notifications, were meaningful distractions for about a third of participants. Meetings and frequent manager check-ins were also prone to derail focus.
Employers are already rueing the impact of these productivity killers, with one third saying these distractions translate to five hours of lost work time per week, and another third estimating their lost time at closer to six to 10 hours – up to 25% of the workweek.
These workplace distractions are just one piece of the puzzle of a broken workplace culture that prizes looking productive and dawdling over redundant, menial tasks over actual efficiency and collaboration, according to Annie Dean, leader of software firm Atlassian’s Team Anywhere. These collective distractions have led to 25 billion work hours down the drain among Fortune 500 companies, an Atlassian report found.
“When I say, ‘Why are teams wasting time?,’ I’m not saying it’s intentional,” Dean told Fortune last month. “I’m saying we’re in a system that, unintentionally, is set up to steal our attention, drag our efforts to wrong places, and make it harder to get work done.”
Shrinking attention spans
Indeed, it’s not just chatty coworkers zapping attention away from important tasks at hand. While employers have the tendency to blame Gen Z’s ‘goldfish memories’ for perpetuating this culture of distraction (64% of Insightful survey respondents said lack of focus was the biggest challenge of working with the youngest generation), zapped attention is not just their problem.
Concentration has been on the decline for decades, argues Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity.
“In 2004, we measured the average attention on a screen to be 2½ minutes,” Mark told CNN. “Some years later, we found attention spans to be about 75 seconds. Now we find people can only pay attention to one screen for an average of 47 seconds.”
Increased job expectations and the daily juggle of multiple projects have overwhelmed employees. As workers attempt to multitask, oscillating between responsibilities, they actually lose time to what Mark called the “switch cost,” the time it takes to refocus on a project, which can happen every 10 or so minutes for multitaskers.
“‘Where was I? What was I thinking of?’ That additional effort can also lead to errors and stress,” she said.
That’s on top of increased reliance on technology and digital communication, which has not only meant workers sift through messages instead of completing substantive tasks, but also results in almost half of employees missing meetings and deadlines because of buried emails, per an October report by Slack.
Revising corporate culture
Neither technology nor workplace socialising are going anywhere, and some managers – particularly Gen Zers bucking workplace convention – are formulating solutions to attention span troubles by leaning into taking breaks and flexibility.
Australian mental health charity leader Milly Bannister, who runs a lifestyle TikTok account, told Fortune she doesn’t schedule meetings directly after lunch, a time she dubs “slump hour”. Similarly, she’ll sometimes take a siesta, or encourage her staff to do the same, even if it means working odd hours to finish up tasks.
“If you need to go home and then punch something out at 11pm after you’ve had a four-hour nap, go for it,” she said. “As long as the work gets done it doesn’t matter to me.”
Bannister’s solution to rigid workplace schedules aligns with what Insightful identified as the key to alleviating the impact of workplace distractions. Over four in 10 respondents said more work flexibility would help increase focus in the office, with nearly the same amount saying a four-day workweek would accomplish something similar.
Not only have early adopters of these practices seen increases in productivity, but they’ve also experienced less burnout, perhaps a herald for a new wave of workers eschewing the workday structure they see as broken and overwhelming.
“I was not made to work 9 to 5 every single day, I cannot focus for that long,” Bannister said. “This cannot be the concept any longer. It needs to be more flexible than that.” – Fortune.com/The New York Times
