Quit Technology Addiction: How to deal with the interference caused by information overload?

In the workplace, people are often disturbed, which in turn affects productivity. Whether it's a digital product or an artificial distraction, we can't focus. This situation can cause personal and economic losses, such as the likelihood of error will be greatly increased, pressure will follow, and productivity will be significantly reduced. Of course, there is no way to curb the situation.

The problem of distraction may have arisen in the middle of this century. Our wisdom, our thoughts, our main tools of efficiency--our attention, are all stolen away with impunity. And stealing them is a variety of constant and unfettered interference. What is frightening is the increasing variety of these distractions, such as emails, apps, telephones, social media reminders, and a wide range of people around. In fact, you will find that there are not many places where we can focus without any distractions.

Jonathan B. Spira has a book called Overload! How the excess information harms your company (overload! How Too a book of much information are hazardous to your from, which shows: in 2010 alone, information overload (including the time needed to restore normalcy from unnecessary interference) caused the US economy to lose 997 billion of billions of dollars. In addition, a study by Intel Corporation showed that for businesses as large as Intel, the cost of information overload was as high as $1 billion a year.

Persistent interference lowers people's attention. In the process of interference, people's energy and emotions are consumed, error frequency, and thus the pressure will become larger. Researchers at Michigan State University and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory conducted a study they found that an average of 2.8 seconds of interference, such as the tip of your computer's corner flashing, will cause a doubling of the probability of error, if the length of the increase to 4.4 seconds, the probability of error will increase to three times times the original.

In fact, interference can also destroy a person's working memory ability, even affect his intelligence level. A study tested the effects of forced disturbances on the surgeon who performed laparoscopic cholecystectomy simulations, which showed that 44% of doctors made mistakes when disturbed and only 6% of doctors did not make mistakes. The number of errors caused by intrusive questioning is the most, followed by online private chat.

Therefore, it is necessary to provide pilots with a non disruptive driving environment when the aircraft is taking off and landing. During these critical stages of take-off and landing, it is not permissible to have unnecessary conversations with the crew or to issue announcements that are not necessary, since regulations prohibit any action that may interfere with pilots.

So what are the main sources of interference, how do they affect us and what measures can we take to curb them?

Digital Jamming

According to research by the Radicati Group, a technology market research firm, the average business person receives/sends about 109 emails a day, and the number is growing at a rate of 7% a year. Instant Messaging has a growth rate of 11%. Text messages that used to be confined to work are now invading the field of work. According to Heywire Business, an information service agency, 67% of professionals say they will use text messages in their jobs. How much interference will this cause? According to the American Mobile Marketing Association (Marketing Association), 90% of text messages are read out in 3 minutes.

Edward Hallowell is a psychiatrist in Massachusetts and co-author of the book "Forced Distraction" (driven to distraction). He explained in his book how attention was disturbed. "It's a huge problem and has become a new addiction," he said. There has been an admissions department for technology Addiction. Many marriages are broken by this addiction. ”

Winifred Gallagher, author of the book, "Focus: Attention and focus Life" (Rapt:attention and the focused), said: "Your messages and emails are like video games that make you addicted." Not only will it irritate you, it will even give you a lot of ' rewards '. ”

In recent years, the rise of texting and social media may have led to a tipping point of "ultimate interference". Michael Salem is a co-founder and Ceo―― of Vorex Inc. located in Texas State Plano, a provider of professional automation software cloud services. Michael says he gets 1000 messages a day. I was completely flooded with text messages. "Replying to these messages has become my daily routine, and there are always 24 hours of information to go back." He said he had been unable to sleep for some time and was lying in bed with calls from users around the world. His health was greatly affected and his weight began to increase. He became full of anxiety because of constant "attack".

Mattew Bellows, the CEO of Yesware, a company based in Boston, USA, is an e-mail tracking service for sales people. Bellows said: "Recently I counted and found that I had 22 inboxes from email to LinkedIn and it would be absurd to focus on and browse through the Inbox." I get hundreds of emails a day. These disturbances are the biggest obstacle to the productivity of modern office workers. ”

The war in the brain

Production efficiency, investment, physiology or common sense, regardless of the angle of view, we should not let the current occurrence of these disturbing factors continue. So what can we do? In fact, the first step is to understand the effects of persistent disturbances on our brains.

Your brain can focus on a lot of things right now, but your focus is on reading this sentence. This is because you are in the "Top-down" mode of attention, that is, you will choose the things you need to pay attention to, develop a focused approach, control and focus. If you can block interference from other transactions, you need to adopt a "bottom-up" attention model, but the main controller of this model is not you, but other people or other things. The bottom-up attention model is part of the human survival mechanism, for example, when you hear a siren or a car engine tempering, your attention is immediately converted to this potential threat. The noise sources of various electronic devices, including email, SMS, instant messaging, phone calls, notification reminders, and so on, are all bottom-up interference that triggers your defensive mechanism to manipulate your attention.

It is not easy to fight these distractions, but there is still the possibility of winning. Gallagher pointed out: "In fact, you are the master of your own mind, attention is only a tool, you can manipulate it." The key is to understand when you want to get into the Top-down attention model and suppress the stimulation of bottom-up interference, otherwise you will be the victim of this stimulus. ”

Interference can increase the difficulty of working memory, while also prolonging the time spent completing the work task. "When a disturbance occurs, it triggers a chain of random events, and people have to switch to something else." Gloria Mark explains. She is a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and a joint sponsor of a study in this field. "On average, you need to do two disruptive things to get back to your original job," says Mark. "For example, you might be working on a marketing project, but in a moment you'll switch to replying to a customer email and then start browsing the LinkedIn page."

Mark spent three days tracking 35 business executives, engineers and project principals. She found that the average time spent on a single task was 3 minutes before everyone was disturbed or switched, and that the time spent on electronic devices was 2 minutes and 11 seconds before switching back to work.

This concentrated interference was misinterpreted by a number of people who believed that the human brain is like an inexhaustible well that can digest unlimited amounts of information, handle multiple tasks at the same time, and can switch freely without loss of output. But the real truth is shocking, but our ability to handle gray matter is limited, working memory, data capacity, and neural circuitry allow us to work efficiently at one task at a time.

Interference can affect people's ability to control impulsive emotions. The more interference, the greater the degree of self regulation is destroyed. For example, you'll always want to check your email, even if you've just checked it five minutes ago. This means that your impulse control and attention can only last in the blink of an eye. Interference lowers your ability to regulate yourself in any way, whether it's checking emails over and over again, or eating ice cream all the time.

That's why technology is so addictive. It destroys the ability of humans to control impulses, including frequently checking whether they receive information, browsing through irrelevant pages, and getting shorter attention spans. This situation brings more interference, and the ability to perform tasks decreases. Hallowell found these symptoms in the 90 's and patients thought they had a problem with attention deficit (ADD).

But patients who are really suffering from attention deficit disorder are actually born. So the attention-deficit patients treated by Hallowell are just another by-product of the symptom. It is actually a symptom similar to attention deficit, caused by interference and information overload. This symptom can inject a lot of mental noise into the human brain, so that the brain loses the ability to remain focused on things. Hallowell this as "attention deficit symptom".

People who have worked very efficiently will frequently switch between different transactions if they have this symptom, and eventually they will find themselves falling behind in their work. When they try to catch up with others, they are forced to produce more fear and anxiety in time. In other words, this uninterrupted interference has caused people to panic, and they are tired of coping, and it sends a signal to the brain to initiate an anxiety response.

10 years ago, Karen Swim created a PR company words for Hire in Heights, Michigan Sterling. "I can feel my heart beating," she said. "She used to be comfortable with the impact of electronic information, but as the information grew over the past few years, she felt increasingly overwhelmed." "Sometimes I feel like I have to stop and catch my breath," he said. It feels like you're running on a speeding treadmill, but you can't keep up. ”

Establish a non-jamming zone

Everyone knows that a lot of interference will reduce their efficiency, but trying to adjust the impact of interference on their own will cause fear in the minds of the owners and managers. In fact, we don't have to do that.

Dan Adams is the CEO of new England Receptacle FX, a company based in Woburn, Massachusetts, that can provide computer services for small and medium-sized businesses. Adams is responsible for installing firewalls for the enterprise to track and monitor the use of the network and social media. "Entrepreneurs are sure to opt out of distractions if they know that they have a lot of cost to consume," he said. But bosses are not sure how much time they have wasted on these distractions. ”

Despite the ubiquity of distractions, corporate and corporate employees are not "under the fight". Some tools can help us curb these distractions and increase productivity.

At the strategic level, companies can make regulations such as restricting the use of e-mail to reduce private chat times between employees and co-workers. Deloitte, one of U.S cellular, Intel and four accounting firms, has been trying to implement "No E-mail Day". Instead of banning email altogether, they encourage face-to-face conversation or voice communication, especially among co-workers. The move could reduce the number of unnecessary distractions.

Yesware CEO Bellows, who spent a year in the Buddhist Holy Land, meditated for hours every day. "In times of distraction, you can't listen, you can't write programs, you can't even think," he says. These tasks require concentration, but an increasing number of electronic devices tend to make people unable to concentrate. ”

Bellows is trying to reduce this interference. Yesware employees are not allowed to ask questions when they work. They will post for help on the intranet interface of Hipchat.com, and their colleagues will be logged in during their free hours. Bellows will arrange a period of uninterrupted time on his work schedule and use this time to think. Not only that, he also urged everyone to close their notebooks at the meeting and not allow them to view text messages. Bellows also arranges a few specific times a day to check email specifically.

There are also strategies that can significantly reduce the impact of interference factors. If your email message is automatically sent to you every five minutes, the number of possible disturbances can be as high as 96 times during the 8-hour working period. If you do a manual check every 45 minutes, the total number of distractions will be reduced to 11 times. Researchers from Oklahoma State University believe that the most efficient way to check e-mail is 4 times a day. Professor Mark at the University of California, Irvine, suggests that you can check your email at three fixed hours a day, while others should close your e-mail.

Another way to prevent interference is to isolate a zone without interference. Leslie a Perlow, a professor of leadership mechanics at Harvard Business School, has developed a "quiet time" (quiet) project to screen all distractions at specific times of the day. She applied the method to an engineer in a software company. Previously, these engineers had difficulty developing products unless they worked on night shifts or did not work overtime on weekends. After investigation, Perlow found that engineers were frequently disturbed in their work so that they could not complete their work during normal working hours. Everyone is in a hurry, which makes them a state of mind at a time of crisis, and these engineers seem to have interfered with others as a matter of habit.

The Perlow solution is to take a certain period of the day as a free working time, such as before 11 o'clock in the morning and after 3 o'clock in the afternoon (4 hours in the middle can receive normal interference). As a result, 59% of engineers reported that their work efficiency was greatly improved during the early hours of the day, and 65% of engineers reported that they were improving their work efficiency during the afternoon's undisturbed time period. With a more sober mind, even 41% of engineers report that even during the intervening period, their productivity has increased dramatically.

Harman Singh is also appreciative of the idea of such a setting to avoid interrupting time. As the founder and CEO of WiZiQ teaching platform, he receives more than 200 messages a day. Singh says he is already considering measures and rules to limit the flow of information that interferes. "The state is really crazy now and I don't have enough time to think." This is really a problem. "The disturbing factor that annoys him most is the mobile IM application WhatsApp, who is even considering uninstalling the app, but is worried that if it does, it is not a good thing for investors to be able to reach him." Will investors respect the limits of interruptions? In any case, Singh believes his investors will certainly prefer him to focus on efficient thinking and corporate operations, rather than focusing on social media and endless communication.

How to stay focused?

The way to counter interference is also simple: Draw the line. Without boundaries, everything will be in a state of chaos, like a city without traffic lights. Boundaries can restore the order of a chaotic world. Setting reasonable boundaries for electronic devices and human disturbances can give you space to think and focus on your work. With focus, you can spend less time accomplishing more things.

In this, the author gives some interference-free management measures to help you eliminate interference, improve focus.

• Check mail only for a specific period of time (two to four times per day is the most effective). Turn off mailbox software and other manufacturing interference applications unless you are using them.

• To reduce interference, where possible, by stating "No reply" in the subject and body of the message.

• Establish Office etiquette manuals and codes to reduce the number of emails not related to work.

• No personal calls during working hours.

• Close browsers and social media.

Meditation。 Studies have shown that Buddhists have strong focus skills.

• Provide staff with spiritual training courses, teach them how to improve their concentration, focus on the present and prevent overwork.

• Try something that allows you to focus on something, such as learning a language or musical instrument, playing chess, or tennis or archery.