Being completely absorbed in your work and making big strides: that is very satisfying. But our concentration is disrupted all day long by emails, messages, social media notifications and phone calls. Every interruption costs more than you think. Research by Gloria Mark of the University of California shows that after an interruption, people need about 23 minutes on average to return to their original task. Mark et al. People who are interrupted often work faster to make up for it, but experience more stress and time pressure as a result. Mark et al. At the end of a day like that, thoughts keep spinning in your head and you find it hard to unwind. And despite all your efforts, you think: what have I actually done today?
What are the four concentration leaks?
Someone who knows a lot about focus and productivity is psychologist Mark Tigchelaar, co-founder of Focus Academy and author of the book Focus AAN/UIT (Focus ON/OFF). Odido Business According to Tigchelaar, there are four major obstacles to focused work:
- Our own addiction to stimuli. It makes us find a task boring quickly, and we seize every chance to keep ourselves from our work.
- Our own thoughts. Tasks you don't want to forget, emotions that linger or new ideas that pop into your head.
- Too little rest for our brain. We take a break with a video instead of staring into space for a moment, and stay glued to our screens instead of moving.
- A work environment with too many stimuli.
Why does flow feel so good?
To be truly proud of your work, you need to be able to focus on a task for a longer time, despite all the distractions. If you manage that, you can be creative and get mountains of work done while it hardly seems to take any effort. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this flow: you are completely absorbed in what you are doing. Flow closely resembles absorption, one of the three characteristics of work engagement. UBES manual It doesn't just make you productive, it also makes you happy.
By the way, don't expect to work in peak concentration eight hours a day, five days a week. After a while your concentration runs out and you need to recover. Short breaks of ten minutes or less already give you more energy and make you less tired. Albulescu et al. And people who detach mentally from their work after hours suffer less from exhaustion. Sonnentag So to achieve real focus now and then, you need to let your mind clear regularly. Staring into space now and then is not so crazy after all.
How does a shared language help?
Guido Heezen of Effectory explains that all Effectory employees took a focus training from Focus Academy. Because everyone received the same training and coaching, a shared language emerged. It was no longer taboo to say: 'I'm going offline for the next few hours, because I want to concentrate.' Everyone understands. And everyone ended up with roughly the same kind of inbox: pretty empty.
What can you do as an employer?
As an employer, you can considerably reduce the number of stimuli. Employees benefit greatly from clear priorities and from managers who cut tasks rather than pile them up. Autonomy is also important. According to self-determination theory, autonomy is one of the three basic psychological needs of every human being, alongside competence and relatedness. Self-Determination Theory A lack of it causes stress and gets in the way of concentration and work engagement. In addition, work on a culture in which there is room for relaxation and being unreachable.
Why are work and private life increasingly blurred?
Since we have been working more from home and in hybrid ways, work and private life have become more intertwined. That has advantages: we show more of our real, authentic selves. But the risk is that people are always 'on'. At home, digital traffic often increases too, leading to even more fragmented attention. Organisations that don't pay attention to this run the risk of more people dropping out.
How do you build new habits?
Agree on new habits together. For example, choose fixed hours in which nobody disturbs each other online, or plan focus blocks in which everyone can go deep. That way you reduce the chance of people dropping out, and increase the chance that they find flow and achieve much more with pleasure. Also read how focus and rhythm lead to better performance.
About this article: this piece is based on a blog by Guido Heezen of Effectory, from his series on the conditions for work engagement.
