We have been mulling over what the right number of words is for a blog article. There are mixed messages all over the internet on this one. Seth Godin, has it down to a fine art. His musings on all things communication taking on the (almost) artistic form of a Shakespearean Sonnet (remember I did say almost). But he’s Seth Godin. We’ve basically decided to go with our gut and let the readers vote with their feet.

Can’t Talk, Multi-tasking

Here in our specialist world of interpersonal communication the word count debate got us thinking generally about the idea of attention spans. In the modern workplace, we are basically time-poor multitaskers, communicating mostly via email, Slack and other mainly electronic media. According to a workplace study by McKinsey the average worker spends 28% of their working week on email. Lonely, much? We are often also expected to attend a myriad of meetings which don’t necessarily always have a clear purpose and then need to catch up on the ‘real work’ at the end of the day (by sending emails and using Slack again).

Sound familiar?

We increasingly see a lack of attention span impacting on our ability to engage and communicate at work. A 2014 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that distractions as short as 2-3 seconds were enough to double the number of errors in the original task. As your eyes move from this informative blog article to that tempting cat video please remember that.

Bad Habits at Work and at Play

You could argue this attention deficit leads to poor communication and then judgement accuracy due to lack of presence. The same way we ‘second screen’ at home – watch TV whilst checking Facebook – we also often fall into the same habits at work. Who has been in a presentation where many of the people in the room are on phones or laptops, catching up with work? If you are the presenter it’s far from ideal. It’s likely that such multitasking isn’t that productive either as the focus on each task ‘falls through the gaps’.

Increase your Attention Span

So, what to do? We are all busy and many of us have developed these habits which are hard to get out of. Here are a few things we could try to bring the attention span back to the table:

1. Call it out

Have you been the one who dared to say: ‘do we really need that meeting?’ Encouraging the use of criteria to justify the purpose of a meeting can often remove the need for it entirely. This frees up your ‘presence’ time.

2. Ditch the phone for an hour

Physically put it away. We touch our phones 2,617 times a day so give it a rest. Siri might even thank you for it. She told me you’ve been a bit clingy lately.

3. Focus on the medium

Meetings are ‘live’ so interaction is encouraged. The more people are asked for their opinion the less likely they are to be disengaged. Emails are for details. Slack is for chat. Have you got these media the right way around?

4. Be there for each other

Remember that time when you asked someone a question and they were like: ‘hey, I’m listening’ and you were like ‘wow, that’s awesome, you really care.’

Now it is time for you to practice

So, there we go folks. Under 600 words. We hope our quest to increase your attention span was successful. Now go and do just one thing for more than five minutes and let us know how you go.