How to Overcome the Curse of Self-Interruption

We have increasingly a hard time to focus on something even when it is important. That point is very well developed in the Nautilus paper ‘Are You a Self-Interrupter?‘.

Studies show that we are today constantly multi-tasking, interrupted and quite never alone with our thoughts (are there is always the temptation of checking out our devices). For example, a study has shown that “Shockingly, students could not focus for more than three to five minutes even when they were told to study something very important“!

And more generally, “One interesting aspect of this penchant for combining tasks is that we seem to have lost the ability to single task. Glance around a restaurant, look at people walking on a city street, pay attention to people waiting in line for a movie or the theater, and you will see busily tapping fingers. We act as though we are no longer interested in or able to stay idle and simply do nothing.”

We need to consider this issue – close to a mental health issue – and develop disciplines to take the benefit of connectivity while making sure we still spend enough time with ourselves. It will take time for this to become standard, but we can already recognize at the individual level the need for some effort.