Focus: The joker in a deck of skills for the 21st century workplace

While recently hosting a virtual orientation on a Friday evening for a batch of college students, one of them asked me the question “What is the one skill I should absolutely master to be successful at work?”

While I muddled through the session talking about the importance of non technical skills relative to technical skills, the question forced me afterwards to sit back and think on which one skill I would pick for success in the 21st century workplace.

The answer came to me over that weekend as I noticed a jaw dropping notification on my iPhone: ‘You averaged 6 hours and 37 mins of screen time last week'. This meant that over that entire week, I was juggling between fiddling with my phone and trying to complete projects at work. Before you jump to what I was doing for so long, here are the 5 apps that consumed the most amount of time: WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn, Email and Calendar. While I thought I was being super productive by multitasking, little did I realise that this switching back and forth was degrading my ability to focus in the following ways (as outlined by Johann Hari in the book ‘Stolen Focus’):

Switch cost effect

When we look at a text while working, it only takes a glance and about 5 seconds, or so we think. But in that moment of switching and going back to work, our brains have to reconfigure between tasks and we have to remember what we were doing and thinking about our work before. When this happens, our performance drops and we get slower.

Screw up effect

When we switch between tasks, errors that wouldn’t have happened otherwise start to creep in. When we switch from task to task, our brain has to backtrack a little bit and pick up and figure out where it left off - and it can’t do that perfectly so glitches start to occur.

Creativity drain

Ideas and innovation come from our brain shaping new connections out of what we’ve seen, heard and learnt. But by spending a lot of brain processing time switching and error correcting, we are simply giving our brain less opportunity to follow our associative links down to new places and really have truly original and creative thoughts. 

Diminished memory effect

It takes mental space and energy to convert our experiences into memories and by spending our energy instead on switching very fast, we remember and learn less. 

When we spend our time switching a lot, we lose our ability to focus. We are slower, make more mistakes, are less creative, and remember less of what we do. It’s a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of distraction.

In the deck of skills for the 21st century workplace, focus is the unique and powerful joker which can combine with every other skill to help us win the game.

So the next time, you get a WhatsApp notification at work, think twice before glancing at your phone.