Importance of safeguarding focus in professional life continues to gain attention
Billede af Jonas Svidras fra Pixabay
Recent years have seen growing public awareness of the potential threats to focus and attention span, across a wide range of different domains — with the professional world at large being a particular area of focus.
With the recent release of the much acclaimed book “Stolen Focus,” by the highly acclaimed author Johann Hari, who had previously written the hit book “Lost Connections,” there is set to be a renewed wave of interest in this topic, and in the ways in which social structures, business incentives within Silicon Valley, and workplace norms more broadly, may be involved in this issue.
Focus may be a determining factor in quality of work and productivity
Psychological researchers have, in recent times, found compelling evidence that a heightened degree of distractibility may be a major impediment to anyone striving to optimise productivity on a personal level, while simultaneously having a dramatic impact on the quality of work and productivity of entire teams and companies.
Among a range of findings from researchers is the fact that relatively momentary distractions — such as, for example, a few seconds spent checking a phone notification — can lead to prolonged periods of reduced focus and productivity, of up to perhaps half an hour.
Previous to Johann Hari’s latest book, another popular writer — Cal Newport — addressed this topic and some of the evidence supporting it in his acclaimed book “Deep Work.”
This issue has begun to gain enough attention for a boom in the popularity of distraction-reducing “single purpose” devices, such as the “Light Phone” and the “reMarkable Tablet.”
Many features of the modern workplace may directly undermine focus, and need to be accounted for
While the digital space has taken over much of contemporary branding and marketing, it certainly hasn’t removed the need for dynamic and effective physical presentation of goods, which is no doubt a reason why many individuals and companies will choose to work with companies such as ribbon.co.uk.
In fact, modern workplaces may, if anything, find themselves home to a heightened level of scepticism about the ever-increasing digitisation of the professional landscape, with open plan working areas and the expectation of constant availability on messaging apps being particularly cited as threats to deep focus.
Regulation may be key to tackling the undermining of focus
In “Stolen Focus,” Hari looks at the way in which leading companies in the tech industry appear to be directly complicit in undermining public focus, in no small part through a perverse incentive structure under which user attention and “engagement” are highly commodified and sold to advertisers.
These features and approaches appear to be built into the culture of the modern tech landscape to such a degree that Hari and many others believe that government regulation is essential in order to properly address the issue and to establish a new set of norms and business practises that safeguard the focus and wellbeing of the public, and of businesses at large.