Distractions: Why Do They Occur and 4 Ways to Avoid Them
Distractions may seem unavoidable until you begin to understand the psychology behind them before attempting to reduce them.
Picture this.
An important presentation is coming up soon. You are working with extreme focus, avoiding breaks to ensure that your assignment receives your undivided attention and is completed before the deadline. Suddenly, you hear a very light sound “Ting!”. It's your phone, which you forgot to turn off before you began.
You pick up your phone to view the notification you received and it is a promotional email from a furniture store. By clicking the link in the email, you are now browsing through their fall catalogue. That simple interruption was all it took to drive your attention away from the important presentation and down an unnecessary rabbit hole.
Sound familiar? We are constantly barraged by an endless stream of distractions in our daily lives. While it may act as a break or be pleasurable to us in the short term, it can impair our productivity in the long run. So how do we work around something unavoidable while also trying to maximise our productivity and performance?
To do this we must first understand the basics of distractions, the psychology behind them and the costs of being distracted. These are the aspects that we will explore in detail in this article. You might also want to stick around till the end because we consider 4 ways through which you can reduce distractions supported by expert opinions and research.
Shortcuts For The Busy Reader
What Are Distractions?
According to American Psychological Association (APA), distractions are tasks or stimuli that divert our attention away from the task that we are currently doing. While we frequently tend to use the word distractions in the context of work, in reality, they can redirect our attention from any task be it spending time with our family or friends or even ourselves. Whether it be through our phone usage, multitasking or something as minor as background noises, we frequently succumb to distractions.
What Is The Psychology Behind Distractions?
Psychologists and self-improvement experts have floated around a few ideas while trying to understand the psychology and the internal mechanisms behind distractions.
To start with let us consider the various triggers of distractions.
Nir Eyal, a lecturer and the best-selling author of Hooked and Indistractable is one of the most prominent voices in understanding this phenomenon and puts forward the notion that it is triggered by both external and internal cues.
External cues are those stimuli that emerge from the environment. We might experience these external cues in the form of phone notifications, video games, social media, news alerts, surrounding noise, people or even in the form of the environment in which we study or work.
Internal cues, on the other hand, are those that emerge from within us and are usually caused by intrusive urges, thoughts, and emotions. Eyal further adds internal cues tend to be negative in nature and when we tend to experience them, we use distraction as a means to escape that negative emotion. For instance, to avoid feeling boredom, tiredness, uncertainty, hunger or fear we might engage in behaviours such as pondering about what we want to do after completing a task, ruminating about our personal issues or global events, and so on.
In fact, contrary to popular belief our biggest distractor is in fact our own minds or in other words, we mostly tend to be distracted by ourselves. Matthew Killingworth and Daniel Gilbert from Harvard University through their research showed that our minds are wandering over 47% of the time we spend awake, thinking of events of the past or some that could happen in the future or in some cases might not happen at all. They contend that this experience is so natural to us that we don't even recognise when it happens.
They are not the only ones who believe that distraction is a natural tendency; researchers at the University of California and Princeton University share similar views. They observed that, although we assume we are paying total attention to a task, we are actually shifting our attention in and out of it four times per second! That means that even with our full attention on the task at hand, we do have sudden bursts of distraction in between.
Furthermore, they were also able to highlight that when we are focusing on any task, for a brief period, we tend to shift our attention to the surrounding environment. This is done to evaluate if any other task is pertinent that requires our immediate attention, if there isn't any, we tend to revert back to the primary task.
On the other hand, Niels Taatgen and her colleagues brought a somewhat different perspective to this matter. They suggested that task-specific goals and distracting tasks compete for our attentional resources equally. For example, if we had a paper due in college, our aim of finishing the assignment competes with the same mental resources as the notifications on our phones. In such a scenario, we only get distracted when the task-related goal no longer requires our attention.
The studies and ideas we explored above do give us various perspectives considered by the scientific community when referring to this phenomenon. These however do not definitively provide us answers regarding the mechanisms of distractions, as the study in that domain is still ongoing. However, there is one aspect of distraction has been comprehensively studied. That involves exploring its impact on us.
What Is The Cost of Being Distracted?
To grasp the cost of being distracted we must begin right from the top, and look at this issue on a macro level.
Within organisations, distracted employees can cause considerable financial problems for their employers. According to statistics from the United States alone, corporations lose over $650 billion each year as a result of digital distractions in the workplace.
Aside from digital distractions, other stimuli in the workplace that divert our attention away from tasks must also be considered. Frequent interruptions to conduct meetings and conversations with our colleagues can also be extremely distracting in the workplace. To give you context, an average employee tends to be interrupted from their task once every three minutes which can really have an effect on their performance as well.
A 2012 study by Andreas Liebl and colleagues was able to explore the impact of these work disturbances on employees. They discovered that when we work in an environment with audio disruptions, regardless of whether the sounds are unintelligible or at a low volume, our performance and well-being suffer.
Once we are distracted from any task due to these factors it takes us approximately 23 minutes to get back to the task at hand. Not just that, but to make up for the lost time, we tend to work faster, often wrestling with heightened stress levels and increased time pressure and frustrations.
Distractions have an impact on other domains of our lives as well. For instance, among students, the usage of technological devices within the classroom for non-academic purposes results in poorer test scores. On the other hand, children whose parents are distracted by their phones are more likely to sustain playground injuries.
With such mounting evidence suggesting the negative impacts of distractions, let us finally take a look at the steps through which you can minimise distractions in your life.
4 Ways to Keep Yourself From Getting Distracted
You can minimise the distractions in your life by blocking distracting websites, being aware of your internal triggers, planning your day and avoiding multitasking. Let us look at each of these steps closely.
1. Block Distracting Websites and Apps
Do you find yourself often checking social media or websites and apps that are not essential to your work?
If you want to change this and increase your focus towards work, you can begin by installing web extensions or software to block distracting websites.
Although this may sound like generic advice, its effectiveness has been demonstrated by research.
Take for example the 2017 field study carried out at the University of California, Irvine, in which employees were asked to work for a week using a blocking software and one week without. Making use of the blocking software showed greater levels of focus and productivity among staff at the end of the experiment. Those who were easily distracted by social networking platforms, in particular, benefited the most from this.
But here is the catch. The blocking software or apps on your tab and phones cannot work alone, they work in tandem with our personality. Let me explain.
A follow-up study to the one mentioned above helped highlight that these benefits were only observed among those who felt they had low control over their work or lacked perseverance. In fact, the lack of distractions had a counterproductive effect on perseverant employees who felt they had control over their work. This was the case because the lack of distractions in the latter’s workday would allow them to work for long periods without any breaks which consequently would make them feel more stressed.
Regardless of whether you feel higher or lower autonomy with work, limiting your phone and social media usage is a good place to start. While working, set aside a certain time to look at the emails you have received. This could help balance your productivity and your need for distractions.
2. Plan Your Day Out
When we are trying to avoid distractions, time management can be a really useful tool. It allows us to take charge and be more mindful of how we split our time and attention each day.
You can begin by planning your day by writing down all the tasks you would need to accomplish by the end of the day. Make sure to incorporate break times and activities throughout the day as they might help you be more focused during the time designated for work.
Furthermore, identify the time of day when you feel the most productive and accomplish your most challenging task during that time. For example, if you find that you are more productive at night, allocate complex activities to that time of day and avoid focusing on other tasks such as responding to emails. You can complete these things at other times of the day.
Time blocking is another useful tool that can help you reduce distractions and schedule your day. This would entail breaking up the day into chunks, assigning a task or group of tasks to each, and completing tasks in one block. The blocks do not have to be work-related; they can also include time spent with family, exercise, reading emails, and self-care. However, it is also important that your schedule is flexible enough to accommodate unforeseen interruptions. Time blocking allows us to prioritise and focus on tasks while also reducing the time we spend switching between them, thereby limiting distractions.
Here's an example of how a time block may look. A half-hour meditation time block from 7:30-8 AM, followed by a one-hour breakfast time block until 9 AM, followed by work time until noon.
These are just two of the innumerable time management techniques that can be found on the internet. So, do your homework, figure out what works best for you, and incorporate it into your daily routine to live a less distracted life.
3. Avoid Multitasking
Aren’t we all guilty of multitasking in the hopes of accomplishing our daily goals? This approach might over the long term not yield the desired results as it can not only be detrimental to our work but can also increase our tendency to be distracted.
Experts have suggested that we do not have the attentional capacity to be able to focus on two tasks at the same time and as a result when we multitask we are constantly moving our attention from one task to another. The jumping between tasks might not be as useful as we think as research findings suggest it could reduce our productivity by up to 40%!
Not only that, but multitasking may have an effect on our distractibility. A 2016 study found that participants who engaged in media multitasking behaviour (e.g., responding to texts while viewing a YouTube video) were more likely to become distracted when exposed to distracting stimuli. This is because multitaskers struggle to filter out irrelevant stimuli because they believe all input to be relevant, making them more susceptible to distraction.
That being, said we can make efforts to reduce our multitasking by implementing the aforementioned steps of keeping our phones away and effectively scheduling our days.
However, if you need to multitask, try incorporating the 20-minute rule into your regimen. For you to do this, you must focus on one activity for 20 minutes. At the end of the time, you can take a short break before returning to the task or switch and focus on a completely different task. This can be quite helpful in completing more things and increasing your productivity.
4. Be Mindful of Your Internal Triggers
While the strategies outlined above can help us regulate external triggers, we must also think about how we can manage internal ones. We can begin by becoming more aware of our triggers. Dr Jonathan Bricker, a professor at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center outlines the steps through which we can do that.
When we are about to get distracted, he asks us to become aware of the thought or stimulus that is leading us in that direction. Regardless of whether it is anxiousness, restlessness or feelings of self-doubt become aware of the trigger.
Following that, he encourages us to keep a record of our observations by writing down the feelings we experience, the time of day, and the internal triggers.
Over time this practice will help us become more aware of the thoughts and emotions that accompany specific behaviours, helping us to manage them effectively.
Through this article, we were keen on understanding the phenomenon of distractions. Our world is full of them, each waiting for an opportunity to divert our attention away from what we are doing. While research into the processes of distraction is ongoing, one thing is certain: it can have a negative influence on our well-being, performance, and productivity. Identifying our distractors and learning how to manage them is, therefore, crucial as it helps us get one step closer to unlocking our full potential.
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