How technology is sapping our attentions spans – and productivity - The Globe and Mail

Sorry, boss. This column is late. I got distracted by some texts, then my fitness app reminded me it was time to go for a walk and then there was this amazing YouTube video of a man clearing out a huge wasps' nest. You get the idea.

But if my productivity is suffering, sir, I have an excuse: So is everyone else's.

A new post on the Bank of England's Bank Underground site draws a link between increased smartphone usage and falling productivity in developed countries. It ponders whether a growing onslaught of digital media, scientifically designed to grab and hold our attention, is draining a scarce resource – our ability to pay attention to what is in front of us.

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"Might the crisis of attention be affecting the economy?" asks Dan Nixon of the Bank of England. "The most obvious place to look would be in productivity growth, which has been persistently weak across advanced economies over the past decade (during which time, as it happens, global shipments of smartphones have risen roughly tenfold)."

Estimates of cyberslacking – that is, using the internet and mobile technology during working hours for personal purposes – indicate that technology is already sucking up vast amounts of our most productive time.

I know you will find this as shocking as I do, sir, but people typically spend one hour of their workday on social media, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. Amazing as that figure is, it only begins to account for the full impact of smartphones on output. According to Mr. Nixon, office workers require around 25 minutes to recover from interruptions before returning to the task at hand.

Of course, new technology isn't a one-way street. Many people have complained – but not me, sir, not ever – about how smartphones extend our working hours by putting us in permanent contact with the office.

A few years back, worker advocates seemed to specialize in delivering stern lectures about the growth of "weisure time," a term that was invented to describe the mix of work and leisure that now fills many evenings and weekends. Anyone who's spent a Saturday afternoon answering e-mails from colleagues and clients knows that smartphones are a Trojan horse: They allow us to bring personal communication into the office, but they also let business infiltrate our personal time, turning supposed down time into unpaid working hours.

Weisure time, though, hasn't proven to be exactly the one-sided deal that critics feared. If smartphones were allowing employers to extract vast amounts of free work from their staff, output should be booming as a result of all that unpaid labour. That is the opposite of what is occurring. Productivity growth in Canada and the United States has been lacklustre in recent years.

One possibility – and I rush to say this observation doesn't apply to you, boss – is that smartphones are not only occupying our time but also making us dumber. "An influx of e-mails and phone calls … is estimated to reduce workers' IQ by 10 points – equivalent to losing a night's sleep," Mr. Nixon writes.

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He suggests that habitually distracted minds may be one of the major causes of lagging productivity. In a world where a multitude of e-mails, texts and other digital flag wavers compete for our focus, many of us fall into a pattern of constantly scanning multiple channels of information to stay on top of things. "The problem is that this mode of working – termed 'continuous partial attention' – serves to fragment our attention, reducing our focus on the task at hand," Mr. Nixon says.

Our inability to concentrate is only going to get worse as online developers gain insight into how to make smartphone apps and websites more addictive. One simple example is the bottomless scrolling news feed, which entices you to keep scrolling further and further in hopes something good will pop up. As Mr. Nixon notes, the strategy here is what psychologists call intermittent variable rewards. It is exactly what gets people hooked on slot machines.

So what can we do to fight back? Some companies are doing away with e-mail. Others are offering courses in mindfulness to encourage people to stay in the moment. Still others are redesigning systems to reduce the need for multitasking.

All of these ideas merit your attention, sir. But for now, let me send you a link to that YouTube video.

http://ift.tt/2AtBwtz