Distraction and productivity

What distracts you?

You are focused on working and before you realize it you are staring out the window. You’ve most likely experienced it before. This is what we call distraction. It causes you to focus your attention on something else instead of the thing you should be doing, but sometimes it can also be nice to be distracted for a while, like a colleague walking by or a beautiful memory suddenly comes to mind.

In this part of the workshop, we will give you more information about distractions and how you can get more control over them. In recent years, technologies are more and more integrated into our daily lives. Therefore we will base our examples on this.

We’ll start at the beginning, the cause. Distraction is caused by the lack of attention or lack of interest in your task. You’re currently seeing something more interesting (though often less productive) compared to what you need to do. The result of distraction is that the average person checks their phone 200 to 500 times every day, checks their mail, looks at social media, … this lowers your focus and produces mediocre results.

What happens when you focus your attention on something else?

Find out by moving your mouse over the figures below!

Attention residue

Represents the extent to which a person’s attention is only partially focused on a current activity (task or social interaction) because a prior activity is still holding part of his or her attention. More precisely, that prior activity has stayed active in working memory – up through the present – and keeps attracting attention even though one has had to engage in another activity.

Cognitive or mental bandwidth

Also called your mental space. It refers to your cognitive ability to pay attention, make good decisions, stick to schedules, and resist temptations.

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