Dr Adam's Blog

When you run your own business you wear a number of hats and you are often jumping from one task to the next. New research tells us that the average person in an office environment is interrupted 11 times in an hour. Sounds a lot but when you think about it most people are constantly responding to their email alert, answering the phone, having people come into their office, suddenly remembering things that they should have done and dealing with noise from open plan offices. What’s the fall out of all these interruptions? The fall out is a massive reduction in productivity and creativity. A study by Basex found that office distractions take up 2.1 hours of the average day (28%) with workers taking an average of 5 minutes to recover from a distraction and re-focus on the original task. In fact a recent study conducted by The Institute of Psychiatry at King's college London, compared the cognitive ability of people who had been multi tasking and people who had just smoked marijuana. Who came out on top? The drug affected workers. The reason why is that multitasking is incredibly stressful on the brain, it impairs short term memory and concentration. The result is that the brain is left in an impaired state. This message is important for the leaders of the business. Due to distractions and interruptions people rarely get the time to think creatively and come up with innovative ideas. We need to minimize distractions and start to focus again. A recent study by my company Dr Adam Fraser Pty Ltd showed that the top 10 distractions were:

1. Emails – office alert and volume of emails
2. People – office colleagues
3. Phone – office and mobile
4. Distracting thoughts – thinking of the next thing to do
5. Noise - in open plan offices
6. Clients expecting instant responses
7. Personal Issues playing on your mind
8. Un-necessary meetings
9. Mixed priorities from management
10.Fatigue

Strategies to minimise distractions:
Turn off the email alert
Check your email at certain points of the day, for example every hour or every two hours.
During important tasks when you need to focus block all distractions or remove yourself from the office environment.
Communicate to people around you that at certain points of the day you are not to be disrupted.
If the noise around you is too great look at using ear plugs at certain points of the day.

Taken from
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/technology/17distracted.html?th&emc=th

Driven to Distraction
SAN FRANCISCO — On the day of the collision last month, visibility was good. The sidewalk was not under repair. As she walked, Tiffany Briggs, 25, was talking to her grandmother on her cellphone, lost in conversation.
Phones aren't just distracting drivers; they make pedestrians inattentive too.
“I ran into a truck,” Ms. Briggs said.
It was parked in a driveway.
Distracted driving has gained much attention lately because of the inflated crash risk posed by drivers using cellphones to talk and text.
But there is another growing problem caused by lower-stakes multitasking — distracted walking — which combines a pedestrian, an electronic device and an unseen crack in the sidewalk, the pole of a stop sign, a toy left on the living room floor or a parked (or sometimes moving) car.
The era of the mobile gadget is making mobility that much more perilous, particularly on crowded streets and in downtown areas where multiple multitaskers veer and swerve and walk to the beat of their own devices.
Most times, the mishaps for a distracted walker are minor, like the lightly dinged head and broken fingernail that Ms. Briggs suffered, a jammed digit or a sprained ankle, and, the befallen say, a nasty case of hurt pride. Of course, the injuries can sometimes be serious — and they are on the rise.
Slightly more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms in 2008 because they got distracted and tripped, fell or ran into something while using a cellphone to talk or text. That was twice the number from 2007, which had nearly doubled from 2006, according to a study conducted by Ohio State University, which says it is the first to estimate such accidents.
“It’s the tip of the iceberg,” said Jack L. Nasar, a professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State, noting that the number of mishaps is probably much higher considering that most of the injuries are not severe enough to require a hospital visit. What is more, he said, texting is rising sharply and devices like the iPhone have thousands of new, engaging applications to preoccupy phone users.
Mr. Nasar supervised the statistical analysis, which was done by Derek Troyer, one of his graduate students. He looked at records of emergency room visits compiled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Examples of such visits include a 16-year-old boy who walked into a telephone pole while texting and suffered a concussion; a 28-year-old man who tripped and fractured a finger on the hand gripping his cellphone; and a 68-year-old man who fell off the porch while talking on a cellphone, spraining a thumb and an ankle and causing dizziness.

Young people injured themselves more often. About half the visits Mr. Troyer studied were by people under 30, and a quarter were 16 to 20 years old. But more than a quarter of those injured were 41 to 60 years old.
Pedestrians, like drivers, have long been distracted by myriad tasks, like snacking or reading on the go. But the constant interaction with electronic devices has made single-tasking seem boring or even unproductive.
Cognitive psychologists, neurologists and other researchers are beginning to study the impact of constant multitasking, whether behind a desk or the wheel or on foot. It might stand to reason that someone looking at a phone to read a message would misstep, but the researchers are finding that just talking on a phone takes its own considerable toll on cognition and awareness.
Sometimes, pedestrians using their phones do not notice objects or people that are right in front of them — even a clown riding a unicycle. That was the finding of a recent study at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., by a psychology professor, Ira Hyman, and his students.
One of the students dressed as a clown and unicycled around a central square on campus. About half the people walking past by themselves said they had seen the clown, and the number was slightly higher for people walking in pairs. But only 25 percent of people talking on a cellphone said they had, Mr. Hyman said.
He said the term commonly applied to such preoccupation is “inattention blindness,” meaning a person can be looking at an object but fail to register it or process what it is.
Particularly fascinating, Mr. Hyman said, is that people walking in pairs were more than twice as likely to see the clown as were people talking on a cellphone, suggesting that the act of simply having a conversation is not the cause of inattention blindness.
One possible explanation is that a cellphone conversation taxes not just auditory resources in the brain but also visual functions, said Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. That combination, he said, prompts the listener to, for example, create visual imagery related to the conversation in a way that overrides or obscures the processing of real images.
By comparison, walking and chewing gum (that age-old measure of pedestrian skill at multitasking) is a snap.
“Walking and chewing are repetitive, well-practiced tasks that become automatic,” Dr. Gazzaley said. “They don’t compete for resources like texting and walking.”
Further, he said, the cellphone gives people a constant opportunity to pursue goals that feel more important than walking down the street.
“An animal would never walk into a pole,” he said, noting survival instincts would trump other priorities.

For Shalamar Jones, 19, the priority was keeping in touch with her boyfriend. Last month while she was Christmas shopping in a mall near San Francisco, she was texting him when — bam! — she walked into the window of a New York & Company store, thinking it was a door.
“I thought it was open,” she said, noting that no harm was done. “I just started laughing at myself.”
The worst part is the humiliation, said Christopher Black, 20, an art student at San Francisco State University who 18 months ago had his own pratfall.
At the time, Mr. Black said, the sidewalks were packed with pedestrians. So he decided he could move faster if he walked in the street, keeping close to the parked cars. The trouble is he was also texting — with a woman he was flirting with.
He unwittingly started to veer into the road, prompting an oncoming car to honk. He said he instinctively jumped toward the sidewalk but, in the process, forgot about the line of parked cars.
“I splayed against the side of the car, and the phone hit the ground,” he said. He and his phone were uninjured, except for his pride. “It was pretty significantly embarrassing.”

Dr Ad's comment
Just another study that shows being Present and focused helps our brain be more productive and helps us get better performance.

Taken From
http://www.consultant-news.com/article_display.aspx?p=adp&id=6258

Due to greater pressures from work 40% of women who earn in excess of £40,000 don’t feel equipped with the skills to achieve a work/life balance, according to new findings.

40% of women won’t achieve a work/life balance due to stress at work

The research by Morgan Redwood, a leading expert in talent development, is based on 237 detailed online interviews with women from a range of backgrounds across the UK.

With National Stress Awareness Day taking place next week (4th November) these recent findings just underline even further how stress at work is affecting women in achieving a work life balance.

The study was designed to determine to what extent women of working age in the UK agree or disagree with a range of attitude statements and determine their levels of contentment towards life, work, relationships and future prospects. Throughout the study women frequently experienced negative and stress related feelings, with 39% highlighting this fact further, by saying they are constantly feeling anxious.

Janice Haddon, Managing Director of Morgan Redwood says: “With the economic climate as it is many companies are looking to save money, one way of doing this is obviously to add to the workload of their staff. However by doing this, it is having a major knock-on effect. Pressure from work is increasing, meaning stress levels are getting higher. And when this is happening, particularly with women, as this survey shows, a work life balance is not being achieved.” This obviously also affects their work place performance and work place productivity.

The research also identified another interesting fact. For those women who have had children, they had experienced a loss of confidence when returning back to the workplace. Two fifths of women with children who were surveyed said they had lost confidence as a result of having a family.

Haddon comments: “Having children is life changing. With the pressures of returning back to work, and the worry of performing well after time off, it’s not surprising that women lose confidence after having a family. This can add to stress levels, making it harder to achieve that work life balance, as more time is needed in the office to prove their worth and build their confidence up.”

Haddon continues: “We’ve just launched a new series of workshops to help women and men achieve a work life balance and help them deal with stress. Our one-day workshops, self-titled ‘Creating My Future,’ will help individuals find the confidence and sense of purpose to get their lives back on track, stress free.”

For more info on getting control back visit: http://www.dradamfraser.com/CustomContentRetrieve.aspx?ID=187950

The following was taken from a Harvard Business Review article!

Do you have trouble concentrating? Find yourself easily distracted? Before getting in a tizzy that you have attention deficit disorder or something worse, check your stress level. New research shows that stress interferes with attention. The good news is that easing stress reverses these changes.

In a report in the January 20, 2009 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Conor Liston and his colleagues at Cornell's Weill Medical College and The Rockefeller University show that stress blunts the growth and connections of nerve cells in part of the brain that helps keep you focused. The researchers recruited 20 medical students. Each had his or her brain scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while taking a test that gauges the ability to shift attention from one task to another. Think of it as a multitasking test. The students underwent the scan just before taking their licensing exams--a stressful event--and a month later, after a vacation.

Those who were most stressed out by the prospect of taking the licensing exam were the least efficient at shifting their attention back and forth between tasks, the researchers reported. The greater the perception of stress, the poorer the attention to the task. On the fMRI scans, the attention-shifting task lit up several brain regions involved in attention and focus, including the prefrontal cortex. Stress dimmed the connections between these regions. Interestingly, a month of post-exam vacation reversed the disconnects.

Attention is like a Ming vase--highly prized, yet fragile and easily broken.

In a New York Times op-ed piece, columnist David Brooks wrote this gem about attention:

Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses. If forced to choose, we would all rather our children be poor with self-control than rich without it.

Some people are born with this power. Some learn to cultivate it. Others struggle constantly to focus. For many of us, attention is continually shattered by the small hammers of email, IM, a BlackBerry, blogs, YouTube, the Drudge Report, and countless others. Chronic stress helps them knock harder.

Although reducing stress seems to be an obvious solution to improving attention, there's no evidence that popular techniques like meditation, the relaxation response, and others will help you concentrate better. They may, but few studies have tackled this connection.

A proactive approach is unplugging yourself from distractions. A study by Microsoft's Eric Horvitz and Shamsi T. Iqbal of the University of Illinois showed that it took office workers 10-15 minutes to return to an interrupted task after responding to a distraction like an instant message. Their attention wandered to previous unreturned emails, IMs, blog browsing, Web site surfing, checking RSS feeds, and social networking before returning to the task at hand.

After having spent one too many long days at work with little to show for it, I started my own small distraction-reduction plan. Instead of keeping Outlook and my RSS feeds open all day, I now fire them up every couple hours, do what needs to be done, and close them again. It feels like it's working, and I feel a bit less stressed. If Dr. Liston and his gang are right, it could be the start of a feedback loop that will help me harness "the ultimate individual power."

What are you doing to keep office distractions to a minimum?