Your Brain at Work

Distractions are everywhere. And with the always-on technologies of today, they take a heavy toll on productivity. One study found that office distractions eat up an average 2.1 hours a day. Another study, published in October 2005, found that employees spend an average of 11 minutes on a project before being distracted. After an interruption, it takes them 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they do at all. People switch activities every 3 minutes, either making a call, speaking with someone in their cubicle, or working on a document.

It activates when you think about yourself and other people.

The medial prefrontal cortex i

One reason for your wandering attention is that the nervous system is constantly processing, reconfiguring, and reconnecting the trillions of connections in your brain each moment.

Once you understand how much energy is involved in high-level thinking such as planning and creating,

If you have to multitask, combine active thinking tasks only with automatic, embedded routines.

Multitasking can be done easily if you are executing embedded routines.

If you do multiple conscious tasks at once you will experience a big drop-off in accuracy or performance.

Taking time to work out the right order to make decisions can save a lot of effort and energy overall, reducing unresolved issues in your queue. Reducing queues stops you from putting the same things on and off the stage over and over again, which gives you more energy, more space for other information, and overall more resources for focusing on other tasks.

Decisions that get caught in queues, which you try to answer but fail to, are one of the great wasters of your brain’s resources.