Technology at work

How often do you check your phone while you're working?

It might be sitting beside you, lighting up with a message or simply there within reach. You may not even pick it up, but you notice it, and sometimes that is enough to pull your attention away from what you were doing.

I’m curious about what happens to our attention when technology is always within reach at work.

When a quick look becomes something else

We might be halfway through an email when a notification appears, so we check it quickly. Then we see another message, remember something we wanted to look up, or notice an email that needs a reply. Before long, our attention has moved through several things when we were originally focused on just one.

We eventually return to what we were doing, but sometimes we have to work out where we were again.

When everything wants our attention

It's not only our phones that interrupt us. There are emails arriving, messages appearing, meetings starting, tabs open on our computers and people asking us questions.

We can have several things asking for our attention at once, while also trying to remember what needs to happen later in the day. Sometimes we are working on one thing while already thinking about the next.

It can be difficult to notice how often our attention has drifted when there is always something else ready to take it.

When work follows us home

Technology has also made it easier for work to follow us beyond the workplace. We can answer an email from home, check a message while having dinner or look at something from work before we go to bed.

There is often nothing stopping us from doing one more thing, and sometimes that is useful, but I wonder what happens when there is no clear point at which our attention leaves work behind.

Coming back to what we were doing

We will all get distracted at work. A phone will ring, an email will arrive, someone will interrupt us, or a thought will take us somewhere else. That's part of working.

Perhaps what matters is noticing when our attention has drifted and finding our way back to what we were doing. We might close a tab, put the phone aside, finish the thought we were having or simply take a moment to remember where our attention was.

We don't have to get it right every time.

What has our attention?

Technology is part of how we work now.

We rely on it to communicate, find information, organise things and get our work done. At the same time, it gives us more things to notice, more things to respond to and more places for our attention to go.

Our attention can end up somewhere other than where we intended.

I wonder what you might notice the next time you're working and realise your attention has drifted from what you were doing.