Get A 4x Increase In Productivity By Listening To Music | Focus@Will

If you’re distracted, your working memory isn’t able to do its job very well.8 Your octopus has fewer arms to hold on to things.

Distraction is everywhere. As I write this post, I pause to check twitter. Phones are omnipresent and demand our attention. Dopamine hits rule. Yet, despite the potential for greater distraction, a large study finds that on a standardized test, the ability to concentrate is up (modestly) for adults.

day. Increasingly, the focus is on results rather than time spent and on greater flexibility.

Research by Microsoft amongst 2,000 people in Canada showed that the ability to sustain focused attention in the face of distractions had dropped to just eight seconds in 2015 – down from 12 seconds in the year 2000, before the explosion of online images, videos and mobile screens.

One study at the University of Loughborough found that after reading an email, which took two minutes on average, it then took people an average of sixty-eight seconds to return to their work and remember what they were doing.45 It is estimated that unnecessary interruptions and the time needed to get our brain back on track after being distracted

It seems we can manage at most seven bits of information—such as differentiated sounds, or visual stimuli, or recognizable nuances of emotion or thought—at any one time, and that the shortest time it takes to discriminate between one set of bits and another is about 1/18 of a second. By using these figures one concludes that it is possible to proce