Are You Easily Distracted? Why We Have Trouble Focusing Today

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Okay so you're writing a huge paper for one of your classes the night before it's due because of the inevitable procrastination you "somehow" convinced yourself into. You start typing about a paragraph or so then have this sudden irresistible urge to check your phone. Just for a second though! You look at your messages and then all of the sudden you're scrolling through Instagram looking at "the hottest travel locations in 2017," and it's been 10 minutes since you typed that first paragraph. Then when you put your phone down you're finding it exceedingly more difficult to focus, increased urges to check your phone/distract yourself with other things, and writing this paper becomes a much more daunting task.  

Any of this sounding familiar? If not you're much more disciplined than myself and also I mostly don't believe you. In the age of the internet where we are constantly and incessantly connected with one another and thus the world, it becomes increasingly more difficult to focus on other things that don't necessarily involve the billions of other people on the other side of that screen. Why would I want to do something solitary and boring when, as a social creature, I can be instantly connected with every other human on the planet? This drive for connection is a large factor for this phenomenon, but certainly not the only thing at play.

The internet has conditioned our brain to be not only accustomed to, but addicted to instant gratification. When we click on something, we expect to immediately be taken to the corresponding page, instantly gratifying our desire to see that page. When we have to wait to see something else (if for instance the stupid Wi-Fi is out again) we become exuberantly frustrated. Even though when you think about it, we have instantaneous access to every piece of information ever known in the world, and we're frustrated that it takes a few minutes for us to access it. This is because our brains are so used to processing a huge amount of information at a lightning fast pace. When that pace slows down to just a few more seconds, it's agonizing. This drive for instant gratification makes it much more difficult for us to focus on one singular thing, because we’re constantly bombarded with the allure of other people doing other more fun things. Especially, when connecting with all those other people only takes a few seconds.

In the article Task Switching and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, published in the year 2000 by the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, authors Cepeda, Cepeda, and Kramer found that for children who have ADHD switching attention to a new task actually isn't the issue. It's only when trying to refocus on the original task after task switching, is when attention is inhibited, as it takes substantially more cognitive resources making it much more difficult to resume work on that first task. In other words, it's not the changing to a new task that's hard, but going back to the old task right where you left off that's the challenging part. When we switch tasks from one thing to another so quickly, we don’t give ourselves enough time or attention to completely and solely focus on the new thing. This leads to us having a much more difficult time switching back to the first task, and then remaining completely focused on that first task.

So when I switch from writing this blog post to checking my phone, while I’m scrolling through my messages this blog is still on my mind. Then likewise, when I switch back to writing, my mind is now tugged back to my phone with thoughts like, “maybe someone texted me back now,” (usually no one ever does, sad I know). When someone does text me back and then I respond to them, my attention is now focused on when I get that reply. These instantaneous and almost subconscious thoughts impede me from writing this post in much shorter period of time than I normally would. By the way, yes this is a real thing going on right now. Very Meta eh?

Another piece of the equation is something called attention residue. This, according to Sophie Leroy, PhD of Organizational Behavior, and professor at University of Washington, is when you have ruminative thoughts about a prior task while working on a new task. It's basically when your attention is focused only partially on a current task, due to a previous task you just switched from still holding some of your attention. This is because that first task is still in your working memory, whether you realize it or not, so your attention and focus are spread thin as your brain is still processing and working through that first task. This means that the second task has less cognitive resources to work with, meaning it’ll be much more difficult to allocate focus to both of those tasks.

A great example of this, and one Leroy discusses in her paper, Why Is It so Hard to Do My Work? The Challenge of Attention Residue when Switching Between Work Tasks, is in the workplace. We have to constantly manage multiple tasks at once; it’s actually a necessity in order to keep up in our fast paced, ever-moving world. Leroy postulates that "even when people are asked to work on only one of their tasks, their mind tends to multitask: that is, they tend to think about several tasks at the same time." This means that the act of "multitasking" actually includes cognitive processes. It's not the physical doing many things at once that spreads our focus and attention thin, but thinking about all sorts of things. This is reinforced by having to repeatedly throughout the day respond to a never-ending influx of email while still focusing on the current main tasks of your job. 

When you’re at work and your employer expects you to keep up with your emails and messages, complete your main project, attend meetings, discuss future projects, and do all other sorts of things throughout a single work day, your brain becomes conditioned to being spread thin into a bunch of different things at once. When this is the norm, you’ll find you can do a lot of work very averagely. Not having to spread yourself thin leads to being able to do exceptional work on a single task much more often. This unfortunately is rarely a reality in today’s internet-connected, fast-paced world where we want everything instantly.

So how do we solve attention residue? Well the short answer is there isn’t really an answer right now. There’s increasing research on being able to train yourself to focus more on a singular task by removing distractions like your phone or outside noise, but that doesn’t account for a wandering mind. Leroy seems to suggest that time constraints and milestones help but certainly don’t resolve this problem completely. I like to think that being made aware of the cognitive processes you’re undergoing can help (it seemed to help slightly when writing this, although I could be falling prey to confirmation bias). Regardless, as long as the internet and the fast-paced world we live in continues to thrive, this phenomenon of increased task switching and thus the inability to maintain focus on a single item at a time will continue to be ever-present in our lives.