Someone who maximises their happiness is someone who allocates their attention optimally. Unfortunately, most of us are some way away from the optimum. A big part of the problem emanates from the fact that we get distracted from paying attention to our experiences. Distraction is very different from taking a break. Distraction comes from internal disruption, such as intrusive thoughts about whether you left the car lights on or where to go on holiday this summer, and also from external stimuli, such as people and e-mails.
Taking a break, on the other hand, is deliberately chosen to happen at that time. And as we saw before, taking the right kind of break can increase creativity. The same cannot be said for distraction. So if you hear someone say “distraction is a good thing,” what they ought to mean is that a designated break is a good thing.
Distraction is damaging because it requires switching costs. A switching cost is how much attentional energy is required to change from one task to the next. Every time you shift your attention, your brain has to reorient itself, further taxing your mental resources. When you interrupt yourself to text, tweet, or e-mail you are using attentional energy to switch tasks. If you do this frequently, your attention reserves quickly become diminished, making it even harder still for you to focus on whatever it is you want to do. Assuming that what you want to do is a pleasurable and/or purposeful activity, it will make you less happy if you give it limited attention.
So multitasking makes you less happy and also results in less productivity. One nice recent study involved 218 Dutch students being asked to solve a Sudoku puzzle and complete a word search in a fixed time of twenty-four minutes. Participants in the experiment were randomly assigned to one of three treatments: one where they were forced to multitask; one where they could organise their work by freely switching between the Sudoku puzzle and the word search; and one where they performed the tasks sequentially. They were awarded points for each correctly filled Sudoku cell and each word found. The total points scored were lowest in the first group and highest in the third. These results suggest that having a clear schedule of work is better for productivity.
Multitasking can, however, make us feel as if we are more productive, thus resulting in a mistaken belief about it. This is a good reason why so many of us continue to do it. But now you can remember that you’d feel even better if you concentrated on one thing at a time—and you would also get more done. Multitasking takes effort and it’s not worth it. I never use lecture slides for this reason: students don’t waste their attentional resources going between the slides and my voice. This is also a nice example of adaptation, by the way; the unease among my students at the start of term is palpable but the lack of slides is the one thing that they comment on most positively at the end of the course.
The costs of distraction are now more transparent in the modern age. Recent technological advances have brought a range of benefits including national income growth, lower consumer prices, and possibly even higher life satisfaction. And as an academic, my life is made so much easier by being able to download journal articles instead of lugging around piles of books and papers.
But modern technology has brought a few costs, too, the biggest of which is distraction. A recent study estimated the combined cost of distractions for US businesses to be around $600 billion per year. Thomas Jackson, known as “Dr. Email” for his nearly two decades of work on . . . wait for it . . . e-mail distractions, estimates that e-mail alone costs UK businesses about £10,000 per employee per year.
Research also shows that reading something online that is embedded with links makes us more likely to be confused about what we are reading, even when we don’t even click on the links, compared to reading printed text. The mere fact that there is a link forces your brain to make a choice to click or not to click, which itself is distracting. All the time you spend online sharpens the neural circuits dedicated to “skimming” rather than those for “reading and thinking deeply.” When you then go offline, you have trained your brain to attend to things that it wouldn’t attend to otherwise. This is a waste of time where you could instead be experiencing pleasure and purpose.
Happiness by Design is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.