Without a doubt, one of the greatest casualties of the information age has been our attention span. A study released in May 2015 showed that the average concentration span of an adult human had dropped from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to just 8 seconds 15 years later. To put this into some context, humans can now boast an attention span one second shorter than that of a goldfish (whose attention spans are 9 seconds long).1
Our ability to concentrate on the essential is under relentless assault from what I often refer to as weapons of mass distraction. The constant barrage of email, phone calls, mainstream media and social media has conditioned us to constantly switch tasks and split our attention — as much as divided attention is neurologically possible.
Added to this, we have become addicted to unfocused behaviour. According to MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller, every time we complete even insignificant tasks (such as sending an email, answering a text message or uploading something to Facebook), a tiny amount of our body's reward hormone, dopamine, is released. Our brains love dopamine so we're encouraged to keep switching to small tasks that give us instant gratification. This creates a dangerous feedback loop where we begin to feel like we are accomplishing a lot but in fact we are spinning our wheels.2
In a September 2015 tweet, columnist for The Wall Street Journal Jason Gay brilliantly highlighted how normal a constant absorption in technology has become: ‘There's a guy in this coffee shop sitting at a table, not on his phone, not on a laptop, just drinking coffee, like a psychopath.'
Perhaps nowhere is the constant barrage of distraction having more of an impact on focus than in the modern office environment. Recent academic studies have found that office workers are interrupted — or self-interrupt — roughly every three minutes. The problem with this is that once we are sidetracked or our attention is broken, it can take some 23 minutes for us to return our focus to the original task.3
That said, it isn't just technology wreaking havoc on our attention spans. It's the co-worker stopping by your desk with a quick question, the endless meetings and memos, the conversation between colleagues within earshot you simply can't help but tune into. The modern open-plan office is custom-built to destroy focus.
Just as it's of no value going 100 kilometres an hour if you're heading in the wrong direction, trying to go 20 kilometres an hour in five different directions is equally futile and exhausting.
While distraction dilutes our effectiveness, focus magnifies it. Consider how an ordinary stream of water becomes a jet when its flow is concentrated, or how the sun's rays burn when shone through the prism of a magnifying glass.
The type of focus that creates momentum for an individual or organisation is always a function of:
01 zooming in
02 saying no
03 pruning back.
Distraction dilutes our effectiveness, focus magnifies it.
STRATEGY 01
Zooming in
Classical music has always impressed me. As someone who can only play piano by ear, I have often looked with befuddlement at the endless pages of clefs, codas and crescendos in long-form scores — amazed that anyone can read them, much less play them. And yet perhaps the most impressive feat of all is that mere mortals actually composed these pieces of complex and beautiful music. To be able to conceive the intricate interplay between instruments and then turn this into one cohesive score is nothing short of miraculous in my view.
One of the greatest composers of all time, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, offers an insight into how he and his contemporaries achieved the feats of creative genius they did — and it's all about focus: ‘The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at a time,' he famously observed.
And that is the power of focus. To zoom in and focus on the one thing — the one instrument, the one chord, the one melodic line — rather than trying to write an entire symphony at once.
Beyond the world of classical composition, the same principle applies. Whether you're running a business or a marathon, staying ruthlessly focused on the small things is what brings results.
In the words of celebrated American author Og Mandino, ‘It is those who concentrate on but one thing at a time who advance in this world.'
I remember being struck by the power of focus at a conference once when a speaker brought an audience member up on stage. This particular audience member, let's call him Don, clearly had poor sight — the lenses in his glasses were of the Coke-bottle variety.
The speaker handed Don a newspaper page filled with small print and asked him to read it. With his glasses on, Don had little trouble at all. Next, the speaker asked Don to remove his glasses and attempt to read the newspaper again. Unsurprisingly, Don didn't have a hope. He said the page looked like a blurred mass of black and white — completely illegible.
What the speaker did next was what I'll never forget. He took the newspaper and placed over it a sheet of cardboard with a hole cut out just large enough to fit one letter. He handed the newspaper back to Don. To my amazement, Don had no trouble making out the letter and as he slid the cardboard along the page, he read the tiny print letter by letter with ease — and all without his glasses.
Speaking with my optometrist recently, I asked how this could possibly have been the case. She shared that this technique is actually one that doct...
