It’s easier to remove the temptation in the first place.Īs I write these words, my smartphone is in another room, and the internet in my office is disconnected. The answer to this, I’ve found, is to disconnect-frequently-especially when I have to hunker down to work on important projects. Not all tasks are created equal, and while the internet is essential, chances are we accomplish more by doing other tasks like designing and engineering the next version of a product, writing a report, talking to clients, and mentoring new employees. While email, instant messages, social media, and other updates are unavoidable, chances are they have lower-return than other work. On top of this, what we actually get done when we’re connected often isn’t as crucial as other work. How frequently the internet interrupts us from more valuable tasks is significant when it comes to productivity. According to research firm Basex, “Interruptions and the requisite recovery time now consume 28 percent of a worker’s day.” Gloria Mark, an attention researcher at the University of California, found, “each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted.” It took the average employee twenty-five minutes to return to the initial task after a large interruption. This by itself would harm our productivity, but the internet also frequently interrupts us by pulling our attention away from important work tasks. It’s impossible to procrastinate and work intentionally at the same time. He discovered something shocking: that the average student spends 47% of their time online procrastinating. He studied how students used their time when they were connected. My favorite study about how we spend time on the internet was conducted by Tim Pychyl, at Carleton University in Ottawa. And it’s difficult to act with intention when surfing the internet. Becoming more productive isn’t about working faster or more frantically-it’s about working more deliberately and with intention. The internet hijacks our attention by overwhelming our brain.Īs you might guess, the productivity costs of this can be massive. The feedback the internet gives us is intense and immediate-a deadly combination. Our eyes are enamored by the ever-changing stream of text, videos, and kitten pictures. Our ears are engaged with the sounds from the computer or the shiny rectangle in our hands. As Nicholas Carr put it in his eye-opening book The Shallows, “The net engages all of our senses,” and to make matters worse, “it engages them simultaneously.” Our hands are engaged as we tap around on our smartphone, slide the mouse across the desk, and type on the keyboard. It has the tendency to do this, and for a curious reason: our brains find it hard to resist the mind-numbing allure of the internet. What happened was that the internet hijacked your attention. You have no idea how you got there-kind of like ending up in a different room of the house, unable to remember what you went in there for. Minutes later you snap out of it, as you find yourself staring at a friend’s 13th Facebook profile picture, the comments section of a news website, or your phone screen after mindlessly cycling through the same few apps on autopilot. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be adapting a few of my favorite ideas from The Productivity Project and posting about them on ALOP! Don’t worry if you’re in the middle of reading the book-they won’t spoil much, and I’ve taken out a few of the weird stories, interviews, and anecdotes :-) Enjoy! -ChrisĬhances are you’ve experienced this phenomenon before: you fire up your web browser with the best of intentions, but suddenly, without realizing, you fall into an internet trance.
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