Mrs Alison Carmichael, Head of Academic Support
At no time in the past have we had to cope with as many distractions to our work as we do today. Paying attention has never been as difficult as it is now. New skills and abilities are needed to cope with the plethora of distractions that life in 2016 entails. A generation ago, school students did not have to cope with technological distractions, web-based distractions and all of the social entanglement that arises from these innovations. A generation ago an instruction to ‘pay attention’ meant to stop day-dreaming or looking out of the window. These days it means to control or shut out the electronic input that buzzes around each person for most of their waking time. When was the last time you went to work or school without your mobile phone?
William James’s 1890 definition of attention holds true still, well over a hundred years later. He stated that ‘it implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, and scatterbrained state …’ (James as cited in Johnson, 2011). I think that it is safe to say that in James’s day people had fewer distractions to deal with; however I think the gem contained within his definition is in learning to deal effectively with distractions so that we do not become too ‘confused, dazed or scatterbrained’. This has never been more necessary than in the classrooms and the workplaces of today.
Professor Nilli Lavie (2015) has researched extensively into the concept of attention, and refers to it as a ‘gift’. She says that focused attention affects all information-processing stages from perception to understanding, memory and action. When you do not attend, you are blind, deaf, forgetful and clumsy. Her research has shown that the impact of not paying attention and being distracted can be costly. She maintains that in an 8-hour working day 2.1 hours will be lost to distraction. Employees spend 11 minutes on a project before becoming distracted. Twenty per cent of all car accidents are caused by mobile phone distraction, but having children in a car can cause 12 times that distraction. In 21 per cent of trips, parents have their eyes on their children and not on the road for 3 minutes and 22 seconds out of every 60 minutes. Lavie provides frightening and thought-provoking statistics as to why we need to look after our ‘gift’.
When it comes to interruptions at work, some surprising research conducted by Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke (2008) has shown that people who were interrupted, completed their tasks in less time and with no difference in quality. Apparently people are able to compensate for interruptions by working faster. However, this comes at the significant cost of experiencing more stress, having to put in a greater effort, escalating to a higher level of frustration, and sustaining the feeling of time-pressure. This cost differs among people depending on their openness to experience and their need for personal structure. A suggestion from the workplace to combat this stress is for the customisation of systems to fit people’s preferred interruption tolerance. This may be possible in some workplaces, but is difficult to imagine in schools.
Despite individual differences, attention is regarded as a mental muscle and, like many other muscles, it can be strengthened through the right kind of exercise. ‘Cognitive control’ is the term for maintaining attention when one wants to, and for keeping the attention there when distractions become tempting. The common name for this ability is ‘will power’. Mischel’s famous ‘marshmallow test’ that tracked over a thousand children longitudinally is compelling research about the benefits of will power (Goleman, 2003). This research involved children being given the choice between having one marshmallow right away and getting two by waiting fifteen minutes. The one third of the children who managed to hold out for the entire fifteen minutes were, in their thirties, deemed to be significantly healthier, more financially successful and more law abiding than those who had succumbed to the temptation through their lack of cognitive control.
According to Mischel (Mischel as cited in Goleman, 2003) there are three types of cognitive control: the ability to voluntarily disengage focus from a distracting influence; the ability to resist distraction and not gravitate back to it; and the ability to concentrate on the future goal and imagine the benefits of achieving it. This focus or control can be developed and strengthened through a willingness to exercise the attention circuits of our brain, just as we exercise our analytic skills and other systems of the body. In her book Rapt attention and the focused life, Winifred Gallagher talks about ‘top down’ attention as when you choose what to take notice of — you are in control, setting the terms of engagement. ‘Bottom up’ attention is when something or someone else is dictating to you (for example, emails, texts, phone calls and other extraneous stimuli). To not become a victim, one must learn how to gainfully use one’s ‘top down’ attention and how to suppress the ‘bottom up’ stimuli.
Mark et al (2008) maintain that forty-four per cent of interruptions are self-inflicted; this is the ‘bottom up’ stimuli dominating. Under the guise of believing that we are multi-tasking, we are actually switching attention back and forth and self-interrupting. With each switch, the brain has to adjust to where it left off, which slows down overall performance. Placing boundaries assists the maintenance of cognitive control which allows us to pay attention in an increasingly distracted world.
Interruption-management strategies that have been recommended in the workplace include restricting email reading to certain hours of the working day, blocking out uninterrupted time in the day to think, not checking messages during meetings, using ‘no reply necessary’ in the subject line of emails, turning off social media, meditating and practicing mindfulness. Happy home environments would no doubt benefit from adapting many of these strategies as well. The list could look like this: restricting work emails from interrupting time at home, not checking social media and messages during family mealtimes, learning and practising meditation and mindfulness as individuals and as a family.
Schools have the unenviable task of supporting the home in teaching children how to manage twenty-first century digital distractions, how to pay attention, develop cognitive control, deal with the stress involved in managing the onslaught from ‘bottom up’ demands and developing good habits of ‘top down’ control. This, added to the ever-expanding curriculum, is no easy task. Of course rules are applied — students are prohibited from using social media in class; certain social media sites are unavailable on the school network; protections are put in place. There is, however, still the pressure of interruption, whether allowed or illicit, that students need to learn how to deal with. This may be in the form of mobile messages, alerts and notifications, the very fact of having multiple screens open on the laptop and the constant intrusion of iMessages.
Increasingly, schools must provide avenues to decrease stress and anxiety. Activities such as meditation, yoga, mindfulness, colouring-in, and knitting can be provided as voluntary, out-of-class activities in the hope of creating a more balanced environment. If we are to combat a ‘confused, dazed and scatterbrained’ state then such activities seem a necessary antidote to the distractions which have become an integral part of life at home, at work and at school.
Learning cognitive control (going easy on the marshmallows) and dealing effectively with inevitable distractions are vital skills in today’s world that will allow us to use our ‘gift’ of attention in the best way possible.
References
Gallagher, W. (2009). Rapt attention and the focused life. New York, USA: Penguin Group.
Goleman, D. (2013, December). The focused leader. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2013/12/the-focused-leader
Johnson, N. (2011, November). Attention in psychology. Retrieved from http://www.homeobook.com/attention-in-psychology/
Lavie, N. (2015, February). The gift of attention. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/the-gift-of-attention/5766756
Mark, G., Gudith, D. and Ulrich K. (2008, April). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. Retrieved from https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf