![]() ![]() Most of us, Newport argues in Deep Work, have about four hours of deep work in us per day. When Newport looked at profiles of 25 famously prolific, creative people, he found they spent an average of 5.25 hours per day in deep work. Chunks shorter than two hours impose unnecessary switching costs. Productivity gurus including Cal Newport and Nir Eyal argue that deep, profitable work requires chunks of uninterrupted time that are at least two hours, preferably longer. How interruptions at work impact performance The importance of Focus Time Either way, it’s easy to see how a workday can flash before our eyes all while our to-do list looks the same at the end of the day as it did that morning. The problem with interruptions is that it takes 25 minutes and 26 seconds on average to get back on track. “Yet, results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers.” “eople need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another,” Researcher Sophie Leroy wrote. This is due to a phenomenon called “ attention residue.” Research shows that when you switch tasks it takes a long time to get back to the level of efficiency you were at before you were interrupted. Even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% of your productive time. Not only are distractions frequent, but they kill productivity. Why distractions are so deadly to productivity Other studies show that office workers are interrupted about seven times an hour, which adds up to 56 interruptions a day, 80% of which are considered trivial. A recent study found that a typical employee only has 11 minutes between distractions. Work from Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine has shown that workers typically attend to a task for about three minutes before switching to something else (usually an electronic communication).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |