Attack of the Distractions

I had lunch last week with an old friend, Jay Huckabay. We hadn't seen one another since 1998. Ten years! Think about that. Email barely existed. Web sites were in their infancy. Broadband was just becoming standard. Streaming video was a dream. Just ten years ago.

The irony of this reunion and the relevancy to the Internet is that it took Facebook to reconnect us. Recently, I received a note from Jay when we became Facebook friends. We decided to go to lunch to catch up.

We talked about the changes that had taken place in communications since we last saw one another. And we talked about how each of those innovations was (is) intended to make our lives easier and more productive. But have they?

If not for Facebook, Jay and I would not have reconnected. That's a positive. With email, we can connect with clients, suppliers and friends without playing telephone tag. Documents can be created and sent in seconds. More and more is getting done, but is more really getting done?

When I began my career in advertising, there were an average of five people per million of capitalized billings in the agency business. Today, the average is .8 people per million. We have driven the economics down to the point where fewer people are doing the same work as many more people used to do. But at what cost?

I mentioned to Jay that my most productive time is on the weekend or during the evening when email isn't pinging me and the phone isn't ringing. That is when real thought can take place. During the day most of us tend to suffer from Continuous Partial Attention. It's an onslaught of communication and stimuli that drag down real productivity.

The good news is that it can be controlled. We just have to take steps to do so. You can put your phone on Do Not Disturb. You can turn off your Outlook. You can schedule a couple less meetings during the day. But it requires being intentional.

The greater the number of distractions, the less productive you will be.