I’m Bob Wendover. Kathy is a good friend of mine. She’s got more energy than most people I know. Yet she’s constantly complaining about how she can’t remain focused. That leaves her feeling frustrated at the end of each day, because she’s typically left with a bunch of uncompleted tasks. But as she complains about this each time, she’s always glancing at her smartphone to keep up with all the messages and distractions and pop-ups that tend to dominate her day. When I have challenged her about this, she has defended it by saying, “I have to keep up with everything. I don’t want to miss anything.”
We’re now living in a world where there are constant distractions. Opt-ins, opt-outs, updates, pop-ups, two-factor authentications and on and on. As a result, it can seem almost impossible to remain focused on just one thing. A number of years ago, digital researcher Linda Stone coined the term continuous partial attention. By that, she meant that we are constantly dealing with so many stimuli, our brains are overloaded. As a result, we cannot maintain focus on one particular decision, project or even conversation.
But here’s the thing. It’s been my observation that the best decision makers don’t allow this to happen. What they do instead is work to remove these distractions from their environment and them keep them at bay. They take stock of all these distractions, whether it’s email clearing, social media messages, and a whole variety of other types of interruptions and they have found ways to prevent them from becoming the time and focus drains that bedevil most people.
Of course, you have to work at eliminating these distractions as they have. For instance, what is one distraction you can eliminate right now from your daily routines? It does not have to be some big change. In fact, it shouldn’t be. Eliminating continuous partial attention is about reducing the number of nuisance decisions and distractions at the margins of your day and them keeping them at bay. If I gave you pen and paper right now, as I do in some seminars, I but you’d be able to list 10 or more right off the top of your head. So why not find ways to eliminate them one by one. Here are a few examples.
Close your email and messaging apps when you are not actively using them. Don’t tell anyone you’re doing it. Just do it. If the boss or colleagues ask why you aren’t responding immediately to their messages, simply say you were working on a project and really needed to focus. What can they say?
Use the private or incognito window option in your browsers when conducting searches. This will eliminate a bunch of the time-wasting pop-ups, click tracking and spam messages the algorithms will send you unless you are constantly clearing your cache. In each browser, just go to “file” and in the drop-down menu click on private window or incognito window depending on the browser.
Speaking of that, install a pop-up blocker on each of the browsers you use. Kind of obvious, isn’t it? But have you taken the time to do it?
These are just three of the more than 100 strategies I have identified to help you reduce nuisance distractions at the margins of your day. If you want more, visit my YouTube channel. Just click on this link – https://www.youtube.com/@beatmyburnout
Getting a handle on all this does not happen overnight. But over time, you’ll add an hour or more to every day, gain more personal balance and recover from the effects of continuous partial attention. No kidding! Let me know how it goes.