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Chapter 1
THE SIGNIFICANCES OF DOING BUSINESS IN A DISTRACTED WORLD
Dealing with Weapons of Mass Distraction
Many people have lost the ability to focus. Every time that you hear a ring, a buzz or a ding, you jump and focus on those distractions. When people get in your space or prioritize their momentary need to control your time, it takes you away from important matters and priorities. Attention is scarcest commodity.
Distractions are caused by someone doing something. Distractions may be visual, mental or cognitive. Your accepting the distraction depends upon your inability to pay attention or your lack of interest in what you were paying attention to. Some distractions are so momentary or attractive that you have to shift attention. Distractions come from both external and internal sources.
There are seven reasons why people get distracted:
- 1.Thatās what they know. People maintain comfortable viewpoints and are victim of circumstances.
- 2.They are aspiring to be something else.
- 3.They maintain a niche focus.
- 4.They are susceptible to prejudices and vested interests.
- 5.They are influenced based upon societal pressures.
- 6.False and deceptive messages creep into and often dominate the communication landscape.
- 7.We experience the harmful downstream side effects of a distracted society.
Too Much Information
The average person is bombarded by 1,200 messages everyday. More active people may encounter up to 3,000 messages per day. Messages come from other people, phone calls, e-mails, texts, billboards, publications, radio, television, the internet, phone apps, junk mail, website views, social media people you know and people who network. It has created a ātoo much informationā environment.
The average attention span is 8 seconds. Most humans cannot stay focused on one thing for more than 20 minutes at a time. This is attributable to transient and selective attention. 11% of children have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Males are three times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than females. 4% of adults now have ADHD.
Distractions to the routine and thought processes can and will:
- ā¢Derail productivity.
- ā¢Cause people to spend more time on tasks.
- ā¢Overload memory capacity.
- ā¢Get in the way of multi-tasking.
- ā¢Cause people to not clearly ear what others are saying.
- ā¢Kill time.
- ā¢Ravage thought processes and the development of creative ideas.
- ā¢Reduce quality of work.
The Interruption Cycle
Here are some statistics on what distractions do to us:
- ā¢Most of us spend 70% of all waking hours in some form of communication: 9% writing, 16% reading, 30 percent speaking, and 45% listening. Studies also confirm that most of us are poor and inefficient listeners.
- ā¢Over 6 billion texts are sent out everyday.
- ā¢Of the calls received on your phone, 58% are robo-call junk solicitations. 46% of e-mails are vendor solicitations from lists purchased by people trolling for business. 43% in your home mailbox is direct mail advertising.
- ā¢97% of college students use their phones during class time for non-educational purposes, according to a study published in the Journal of Media Education. Only 3% said they do not use a device during class for non-class-related activities on a typical day.
- ā¢Distracted driving accounts for 25% of all motor vehicle crash fatalities. Driver distraction is reported to be responsible for more than 58% of teen crashes. In 2018, 391,000 injuries were caused in distracted driving related accidents. Distracted driving was cited as a major factor in 3,477 traffic deaths.
Sensory overload occurs when one or more of the bodyās senses experiences over-stimulation from the environment. There are many environmental elements that affect an individual. Examples of these elements are urbanization, crowding, noise, mass media, technology, and the explosive growth of information.
Here are statistics on what happens when one is interrupted:
- ā¢Employees report 9% higher rates of exhaustion and 4% increase in physical ailments, headaches or back pain.
- ā¢One minute of interruption is enough to wipe out your short-term memory, effectively halting your work and mental progress.
- ā¢95% of employees experience a drop in general work quality.
- ā¢Work interruptions can cost you six hours per day.
- ā¢Interruption leads to greater error rates. The longer the interruption, the greater the chance of errors: 2.8 seconds of interruption doubled the rate of errors, and 4.4 seconds of interruption tripled the rate of errors.
This is what omnipresent phones are doing to us:
- ā¢Interrupting your activities.
- ā¢Interrupting your thoughts.
- ā¢Interfering with family time.
- ā¢Harassing robo-calls disturbing your relaxation, sleep and concentration.
- ā¢Spoiling vacations and holidays.
- ā¢Affecting socializing activities.
- ā¢Interfering with events that you attend.
- ā¢Texting behaviors that thwart personal interaction.
Many distractions are ingrained into the system:
- ā¢News segments that always begin with ābreaking newsā and ominous music.
- ā¢Crawls at the bottom of TV screens.
- ā¢Insufficiently staffed retail counters, thus inviting interrupters to your turn at the counter.
- ā¢Pop-up advertisements on the computer, which send you links and rabbit-holes of visiting websites.
- ā¢Apps on phone that encourage you to buy special deals, attend events or pay attention to someoneās website.
- ā¢Differences in personality type, language and cultural orientation lead to further distractions.
These are societal factors that feed distractions:
- ā¢People have shorter attention spans nowadays. Research showed that young people could focus for only three minutes before looking for and accepting distractions.
- ā¢Book readership is down.
- ā¢Stress causes people to make excuses to enable distractions
- ā¢Research indicates that constant interruptions make people dumber.
Subtle distractors change what we are doing more than obvious ones. They depend upon how well we know the distractor. Strangers can be more easily dismissed, such as at networking events. Media distractions can be turned off or muted. Needy friends can be limited. The way that the action system expresses itself is affected by perceptions of those who distract.
Small distractions have big consequences. They factor the kinds of activities that you are doing when distracted, such as driving in heavy traffic, speaking at a crucial meeting, something that might trigger a healthcare crisis and situations that might jeopardize your safety and that of others.
There are people that you meet at events, networking, receptions and business groups. They may fit into these categories:
- ā¢Some are judgmental or envious of you.
- ā¢Some are control freaks who make points of interrupting peopleās conversations.
- ā¢Some are arrogant about needing what they want from you when they want it.
- ā¢Some play the parts of victims and try to draw positive energy from others seen as self-confident.
- ā¢Some are liars, not truthful about what they are interrupting you for.
- ā¢Some are negative, looking for someone with whom to commiserate.
- ā¢Some are gossipers. The lowest form of conversation is to gossip about others. The level higher than that is talking about specific concepts. The highest form of conversation is to talk about deeper topics in positive, motivating terms.
And then there is the concept of purposeful distraction. They seek to embolden groups of people to their viewpoints. These can be very dangerous people. Techniques in its cause include:
- ā¢Dis-information. This involves communicating selective facts and omitting others.
- ā¢Mis-information. This uses statistics, events and positions to craft a false narra...
