You will not finish reading this post.<\/p>\n
It’s in the statistics… \u00a0You will not make it to the end of this article without being distracted.<\/p>\n
Nicolas Carr<\/a>, author of \u201cThe Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains<\/a>\u201d, says that it is extremely hard to manage attention.\u00a0\u00a0 We will get distracted before the 3 minutes that it will take to read this post.\u00a0 This problem is growing as distractions multiply exponentially in our always-connected, web 2.0 world.<\/p>\n I look around me now as I travel on the underground train (the \u201ctube\u201d) through London today.\u00a0 I see the person sitting across from me reading a newspaper, white ipod headphones in her ears and sms-ing on what looks like an Android touch screen phone. \u00a0I look up and around the carriage.\u00a0 Everybody has a mobile out and sending and receiving electronic updates.<\/p>\n \u201cDistractions are costly: A temporary shift in attention from one task to another \u2013 stopping to answer an e-mail or take a phone call, for instance \u2013 increases the amount of time necessary to finish the primary task by as much as 25%, a phenomenon known as \u201cswitching time\u201d. It\u2019s far more efficient to fully focus for 90 to 120 minutes, take a true break, and then fully focus on the next activity.\u201d\u00a0 Tony Schwartz<\/a>, Manage your energy, not your time<\/a> \u2013 Harvard Business Review.<\/em><\/p>\n The evidence from psychology is clear.\u00a0 Interruptions have a major detrimental effect on your productivity.\u00a0 School does not have classes on focus, on cutting out the email, facebook, twitter, mobile phone calls and concentrating for extended periods on something driven by me, something that is not a reaction to a tweet or a status update or a call.\u00a0 This is a skill that you need to decide to learn for yourself.<\/p>\n There are times when letting the distractions in can be fun and necessary.\u00a0 Total focus is not a state that you will want to spend all of your time in.\u00a0 Responding to email, being aware of the action around you, twitter, facebook are part of being connected to the world around you.<\/p>\n However, in order to move beyond a permanent zombified state of reaction to incoming stimuli, you must develop the ability to create windows of focus in your life.<\/p>\n Don’t make it any more difficult than it needs to be. \u00a0Remember the “squirrel” in the Disney\u00a0film UP<\/a>… \u00a0every time the dog is just about to do something useful he sees a squirrel and forgets his task:<\/p>\n A monk called Dandapani told me once that there are 3 daily\u00a0practices that improve our focus:<\/p>\n Use these 3 steps in every area of your life: from making the bed in the morning, to tidying the kitchen, to reading to your child, to writing emails, to writing blog posts\u2026<\/p>\n You made it here?\u00a0 3 minutes of attention?\u00a0 That puts you in the small percentage of people who have found strategies to manage their attention in the overwhelming swarm of distractions that make up a typical life in the modern world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You will not finish reading this post. It’s in the statistics… \u00a0You will not make it to the end of this article without being distracted. The true scarce resource of humanity: Attention Nicolas Carr, author of \u201cThe Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains\u201d, says that it is extremely hard to manage attention.\u00a0\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":239,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8109],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/speakingasaleader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/speakingasaleader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/speakingasaleader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/speakingasaleader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/239"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/speakingasaleader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/speakingasaleader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":349,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/speakingasaleader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions\/349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/speakingasaleader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/speakingasaleader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/speakingasaleader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Distractions are Costly<\/strong><\/h2>\n
There are times for distractions<\/strong><\/h2>\n
First Step:\u00a0Improve your\u00a0Chances of Focus<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Making Focus\u00a0a Life Practice<\/h1>\n
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