Help! I’ve Lost My Focus!

People ask me why I prefer to telecommute, frequently saying “don’t you miss the interacting with others?” Well, in today’s virtual world of work I can stay at home in my cozy office set up just the way I want it and load up on the best home-brewed Colombian coffee (hey I was raised with this stuff), and still get quite a bit of interaction with others via phone, email, IM, and occasional lunches. Only, there is a dark side called distraction. Successful teleworkers have either licked the problem, or succumbed so completely to it that they are now suffering from a new form of “work related” ADD.
In an article by Claudia Wallis and Sonja Stept published by UC Irvine the authors explore how email and cellphones help us multi-task but also drive us to distraction. Previously on a blog post I picked up a thread from Dave Carpe’s passing notes which discussed how email kills more brain cells than cannabis.

Let me digress for a minute – multi-tasking in my opinion is a natural skill, not an acquired one. In fact, I think it’s a “preference” or tendency, not really a skill. Some people have a mindset where they prefer to juggle several thoughts at once in a non-linear way, while others prefer a much more linear approach, concentrating on doing one task. Both approaches may be equally successful, but just the same, both have certain limitations. For example, a multi-tasker can talk on the phone while reading email, getting more done in the same span of time, but perhaps takes a bit longer to do both even though they may feel better about having accomplished more. On the other hand the linear person or “single-tasker” may have a much briefer phone conversation which is equally productive but then must separately make time to read email.
While there are differences, I don’t think that one is better than the other, as long as the multi-tasking is under control and not out of control like they describe in the article. Doing several things at once may come from a need for stimulation, as opposed to a need for focus. For example, I like to read but I have five separate books open, located in strategic places throughout my house. I am reading them all, but it will take me five times as long as if I just read one at a time. I don’t do it because I want to get through them faster, I just like to have several books open. It’s a preference. So I guess I’m not actually multi-tasking, I’m parallel processing.
Back to my point about telecommuting – despite the risks of multi-tasking or parallel processing as I refer to it, I still prefer to stay at home and multi-task than go into the office. The article goes on to discuss how workers at a particular organization involved in the study (read the article if you want to know more, it’s loaded with examples) found that 2.1 hours a day are wasted on interruptions. That’s 28% of their work day. The researchers in this particular study found that employees worked on a project an average of 11 minutes before being interrupted, and once disturbed it took 25 minutes to return to the original task (and some didn’t manage to get back to it the rest of the day).
The interruptions came from five major sources in this order: a colleague stopping by, being called away from your desk, arrival of new e-mail, switching to another task or a phone call. So, multi-tasking or not, I prefer to work from home and avoid the first two big ones on that list. The others still apply in my home office, but I feel like I can “parallel process” my way into keeping them under control.
See you online, if you don’t lose your focus or get distracted by a phone call 🙂