As you read this article, your brain will most likely begin to send you familiar messages that will distract you.

Did I receive new emails or messages?

What are my customers saying on Twitter? Better check “!

Oh, yes, I wanted to see that new product on Amazon…”.

If you are still reading, congratulations! You have been able to overcome – at least for now – one of the most insidious and damaging evils to productivity that today’s workers face: continuous distractions.

It’s not necessary to remind managers or entrepreneurs how their lives have been replaced by email, messages, Facebook, Twitter, internet…. E-mails in particular occupy at least 28% of our time at work, according to Icebraker consulting firm.

Is technology a problem?

Many studies have confirmed that the unconscious use of information technology can have negative effects on individual performance and well-being.
One of the main effects is the loss of the ability to control one’s attention, due to the development of an obsessive tendency to repeatedly use technological devices. This includes sms, apps, emails, notifications, that are not limited to working hours. This also occurs during the moments within the day when you should dedicate yourself to recovering from the workload.

According to some, these distractions represent a loss of productivity of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Gloria Mark, a professor of computer science at the University of California, argues that it can take up to 25 minutes for a worker distracted by a wrong internet search or a text message on his mobile phone to return to work.

This shows how digital distractions and lack of attention in the workplace have attracted interest not only from writers and researchers but also from large and small companies. Entrepreneurs are therefore part of an emerging trend, which we can call the attention movement, or focus movement. Successful start-ups join large companies like Google and SAP in a big experiment: testing new methods to reduce cognitive overload and redirecting attention to what counts. For example, Google employees attend courses to refine attention.

Why is attention important for success?

Neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel argues that the best way to understand competition, learn from employees, define a long-term strategy or innovate is to have the necessary mental discipline to return to what is really important in your business. Only by concentrating intensely it is possible to link new ideas and facts with the knowledge already present in our memory, in a meaningful and systematic way.

In other words, if your mind is present to absorb new data, trends and events and connect them to what you already know, it will be easier to find the disruptive idea for success.

Jumping through digital works certainly doesn’t help. Researchers at Stanford University tested the cognitive abilities of 49 subjects who spent a lot of time on the internet, in front of TV and Facebook and 52 other individuals who did much less. Given the common belief that the internet refined cognitive skills, researchers certainly didn’t expect internet users to get lower scores in cognitive tests. Among other things, they showed much less control over their attention and were less able to distinguish between important and less important information: they distracted themselves very easily.

So what can we do to reduce distractions?

Science shows that there is only one universal strategy to reduce distractions and improve concentration: to train it.

One of the methods that science has proven to be very effective in practising focus is mindfulness meditation. For this reason Neocogita has developed a training protocol dedicated to companies that includes a series of audio lessons for guided mindfulness sessions.

For more information on how to adopt mindfulness paths for you and your team within the company, please don’t hesitate to contact us!