8 Reasons Why You Can’t Focus at Work
Can’t concentrate at work? Here are 8 reasons why.
Attention is a process. When it’s optimized, it’s a superpower that enables you to focus at work and dive into deep and meaningful projects. When attention is fragmented — which is a common occurrence — it ensures that you can’t focus at work, can’t focus when reading, can’t focus on one thing, and can’t get real work done.
When you concentrate your attention, your brain is hard-wired to respond with the ideas, insights, and solutions you need to do your job well. The more often you give yourself quiet, uninterrupted hours of deep focus, the better your brain gets at doing this for you.
So it’s surprising that fostering attention happens so little in the workplace. In fact, company cultures are often an enemy of your best use of time and attention because of expectations and assumptions, often unspoken, like every message should be answered immediately, or working in a distracting, open environment is cool and makes our culture cool. If you prefer to work another way, you risk being seen as not a good fit for the corporate culture or not a collaborative team player.
And yet, it has been shown over and over again that when employees work alone in quiet and privacy (for at least a portion of their day), attention expands, engagement and satisfaction grows, innovation thrives, and work quality on important matters improves. With so much at stake, let’s take a closer look. (Click on a section to skip ahead.)
Honing in on Superpower-Level Attention
8 Reasons Why You Can’t Focus at Work
3. Faux Urgency
4. Distractions
5. Multitasking
6. Clutter
7. Avoidance
How We Lose Focus
Your brain uses attention as its primary filter. Whatever you pay attention to is what your brain tries to serve. That’s why, if you’re obsessed with your hometown sports team, you can absorb a vast catalog of players’ bios and statistics; but you may not remember your neighbor’s birthday.
However, your brain becomes overstimulated when you pay attention to an array of things in a compressed period of time. For example, if you blast through 42 emails (some with attachments), 18 text messages, 3 video clips, a handful of social media posts, check the weather, look up your bank balance, and then scan your department’s KPI dashboard during your first three hours at work, your brain sees that as 70+ tasks, plus any conversations you’ve had, and the energy required to switch from one task or discussion to another, regrouping your focus each time.
What that means is, you’ve taken key resources – attention and its companion, mental energy, and spent them on your B- and C-level tasks, leaving only the dregs for your primary (A-level) responsibilities. Plus, this onslaught of incoming stimuli raises anxiety levels and causes other effects, such as higher blood pressure. So, when you reach the part of the day where you need to figure out how to solve a strategic or operational challenge for your company, or you want to impress your boss with a great presentation, your mental fuel tank doesn’t have much more to give you, and your body has less energy, too.
Worse, the more often you allow this to happen, the harder it is for your brain to distinguish between important and unimportant things. (If you’re reading this and thinking, “but wait, all those emails are essential,” it’s a sign you’ve already passed that road marker. It’s time to hit the reset button.)
Curious how focused you are? Take our focus test to reveal how focused you are. Receive a focus score and a personalized focus plan with practical tips to help you pay more attention and focus on what you can control.
Honing in on Superpower-Level Attention
When you use undivided attention at work in the morning, shutting off those outside interruptions (like emails, texts, friend updates), your brain shifts from what I’ll call surface attention into heavy-duty mode. It’s ready for deep work, channeling its logical and creative powers toward your point of focus. The more frequently you set up and use a period of undivided attention before you surrender to all the smaller, prickly demands of your day, the deeper your thinking and stronger your primary work will become.
Of course, the incredibly powerful ability of intense concentration at work isn’t limited to you alone. Every human has the capacity to use this higher brainpower for themselves. So the question is, why don’t we? And why don’t the companies we work for go out of their way to nurture this asset?
Sadly, it’s because we allow the enemies of time and attention to distract our minds with fleeting matters. Everyone has had the experience of walking into a room and wondering, what did I come here for? You feel as if you’ve forgotten, and you have to retrace your steps to recall. But chances are, you haven’t forgotten – you just got distracted along the way by something else that caught your attention and took its place. That’s how your original mission – e.g., fetching a paper towel from the kitchen – got lost along the way.
Something similar happens when we put our attention on distractions and low priorities at work. Our main purpose – such as the items at the number one and two spots on your “must do” list today – go unserved and slide into the next day, and the next. Somehow this Monday’s priorities go unresolved and reappear as next Monday’s priorities – not a sign of good time management or attention. Meanwhile, every day, those other 70+ items, which have relatively little impact and are easily forgotten, use up most of your daily brainpower.
When we let our attention be drawn into a kaleidoscope of options and activities, our brain tries to work on all of it and ends up fractured rather than focused.
That’s one look at the enemies of time and attention at work. Let me introduce you to a parade of other elements that prevent you from collaborating with your brain at work.
8 Reasons Why You Can't Focus at Work
1. Time Management
It sounds counter-intuitive, but putting too much emphasis on time management can short-circuit your ability to concentrate intensively on any one thing. That’s because the concept of time management is to get the maximum number of things done every day, often staying alert for little pockets of time to squeeze in small tasks. So, while replying to meeting invites as you ride the elevator may save a few seconds, the day-long race to make progress through an obsessively scheduled to-do list, and the persistent hunt for efficiency shortcuts throughout the day, are enough to shatter anyone’s ability to sustain thoughtful contemplation on more important matters.
That is why, if you want to produce actual, meaningful results, you need to shift your focus away from managing your time and toward managing your attention. (For more on this, read my post: Why Time Management Fails.)
2. Interruptions
When we allow interruptions in our workday, it’s because we haven’t learned how to stop them. And every time we permit them, we implicitly grant the interrupters a free pass to repeat their behavior again and again. So, start practicing a friendly but firm “no” and use deflections to turn people away — especially because interrupters tend to be individuals who aren’t used to you being unavailable, like your boss, your spouse, or a friend at work.
One of the better-known problems that come with interruptions is recovery time. It can take as long as 23 minutes to re-establish your train of thought and get back in the groove once an interrupter has taken your attention off your primary task. If you have only 90 minutes to immerse yourself in a key project, then two or three “friendly” interruptions is all it takes to totally torpedo your most important work.
So, focus on tactics that stop interruptions before they happen. First, let the most likely interrupters in your sphere know that you’ll be in do-not-disturb status from, for example, 9-11 tomorrow and won’t respond to calls or emails then. This way, they’re forewarned, which makes it easier for you to hold firm when they try to interrupt you anyway (which they will).
Also, try rehearsing phrases like the following so they’re on the tip of your tongue, ready to protect you. The idea is to cut an interrupter off before they can launch into the reason for their interruption:
“Sorry, but I’m just getting into something else. Can I get back to you after 11?”
“I have to dive into the quarterly analysis right now, so let’s connect at 11.” (And if they persist, follow up with “I’m really sorry, but I just can’t.”)
“I’m in the middle of something on the Perkins project at the moment, but I can meet you this afternoon. Jump on my Calendly schedule and pick a time, okay?”
Another good defense is finding a room with a lockable door and adding a large note that says, “Do not disturb before 11.”
“It is only by saying ‘no’ that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”
— Steve Jobs
3. Faux Urgency
When we grant immediacy to things that don’t require it – and everyone’s guilty of this occasionally – we are only fueling what overwhelms us. Giving weight to something that doesn’t have legitimate primacy over your chief responsibilities is simply a failure to defend reasonable boundaries.
And truly, your Slack-addicted boss won’t fire you if you respond to messages an hour from now, particularly if you’ve set your current status to “unavailable.” And trust that your Facebook friends will survive if you don’t get back to them until after work.
Unless the office is actually on fire or your biggest client is serious about threatening to jump to a competitor, your only real “urgent” event is to make progress on the prime directive of your role. One way to reinforce that with yourself is to imagine your next performance review and think about what it will take to get top ranking and a huge smile from your boss. Focus on those things.
Here’s another important note: If you treat non-emergencies like urgent events, you’re asking your body to produce an unhealthy amount of adrenalin that will ultimately wear you out rather than turn you into the office superhero. Persistent high levels of alert gradually deplete your mental ability to deal with what’s normally on your plate, ultimately becoming one of the main factors in job burnout and resignation or termination.
If you’d like more guidance on this, read my post on attention management.
4. Distractions
From browser notifications to beeping text messages to vibrating phones, distractions divide your attention and turn you into someone who becomes just average or even mediocre at lots of things and no longer excellent at any one thing. If you wonder why you never get to do the things you were hired to do – the vision that persuaded you to take this job in the first place – distraction is probably the reason.
Distractions are the first cousin of multi-tasking, the practice of jumping back and forth from one task to another and then another before finding your way back to the first. When you add in the time it takes to re-orient your concentration following each jump (“Let’s see… where did I leave off?” “Why can’t I find my sticky note with that budget figure – I had it right here,” or
“Where the heck is that browser window – did I close it somehow?”), there’s no cohesiveness left in your mental game. With each distraction or topic swap, your ability to concentrate is reduced, your mind gets weary, and you enter a mushy state popularly known as “brain fog.”
As someone who has ADHD, I can see the similarities between that diagnosis and all this distracting, work-related hopping around. It makes me sad to think that anyone would impose such a penalty on their brain if they don’t have to.
So, if you never get to a place of sustained concentration and focus or rarely have the chance to do thorough work on a project that gives you deep satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment, it’s probably because you (or the culture around you) puts a higher priority on responding to distractions than on making substantive achievements. Recognizing that is the first step in breaking its hold on you.
5. Multitasking
I mentioned multitasking earlier, and if you’ve read any recent management books or articles about being more productive, you’ve already learned that multitasking has been debunked as a performance-enhancing skill, even though some unenlightened employers still list it as desirable in their job descriptions.
Multitasking teaches your brain not to concentrate. It learns to derive pleasure from constant juggling, and then trains itself to reject less exciting prospects for order, calm, and focus. (The nutritional equivalent would be choosing a candy bar for lunch instead of soup and salad. The sugar in the candy bar quickly becomes addictive –you begin to crave it every day at lunch instead of a healthier choice. Multitasking follows that same pattern.)
I reported more fully on multitasking in my Leadership Strategy column in Forbes. That article is How to Reclaim the Huge Losses That Multitasking Forces on Your Company.
6. Clutter
Visual clutter is unsettling to the brain. It raises anxiety levels and adds confusion to your purpose.
For instance, let’s say you’ve asked your brain to focus on sales forecasts. But what your eyes transmit to your brain is a vision of clutter (your desk covered with lunch debris, stacks of paper, sticky notes, computer cords, a jar full of thumb drives, a podcast microphone, wireless gear, headphones, a basket of pens and markers, speakers, your phone, a handful of lists, a bottle of eyedrops, a baseball cap, and a computer monitor with 12 open windows), you’re not giving your brain the calm, clear field it needs to do its best work. That’s because it’s hard for your mind to envision something when its visual field is filled with junk.
The fix here is pretty obvious – clear the decks and install some method of organization that allows your work surfaces to stay clear. If keeping things organized is a challenge for you, check Amazon or YouTube for lessons and strategies on keeping a clutter-free workspace. Whatever approach you choose, make it something you can sustain, where everything has a dedicated place to which you can return it at the end of the day.
7. Avoidance
This enemy of attention is the easiest to identify because it comes with nervous energy. Avoidance is usually driven by negative emotions or similar discomfort. Of course, the most effective way to re-establish an effective level of attention for your project is to resolve whatever is causing those negative feelings. But often, the impulse to avoid can be broken by taking the practical step of identifying the smallest, easiest part of the task and focusing only on that. This puts your brain on the task without the backdraft of emotion.
If you’re making excuses (“I should do my expense report first.”) or procrastinating (pushing the relevant file to the bottom of your backpack, and shoving the backpack into the closet), you’re in the grip of avoidance.
It can be easier to break through these behaviors if you isolate yourself from whatever triggers bad feelings (or that you imagine will do so). For example, you might not want to start a project while your boss is nearby because she’ll realize you didn’t start it three weeks ago, and you don’t want to experience her disapproval. In such cases, change your setting. Work from home or a library – places where you’re safe from the prying eyes of your colleagues – and catch up.
8. Sleep
Strangely, many of us give our phones more time to recharge each night than we give our brains. Yet sleep is essential to getting the most from our attention – and indeed, our lives. Without enough sleep, we’re tired (obviously), but also we have trouble concentrating, learning, and remembering. We’re moody and irritable, more prone to errors, and more susceptible to disease.
Our brains need a full night’s sleep to do their jobs well (that’s seven or more hours for working adults) every single night. During that time, sleep restores our attention span, solidifies our memory, processes our anxieties (through dreams), keeps our intelligence and decision-making abilities high, and rests our eyes.
Its other benefits include well-functioning immune systems, the orchestration of proper waste, and prevention of things like infection, depression, neurological diseases, heart disease, and obesity. With all that to gain – including a much easier path to using your attention effectively at work – it’s worth initiating a routine that ensures enough sleep every day, such as a regular bedtime with screens off and lights out. If you have trouble getting to sleep at night and don’t want to rely on drugs, start getting some exercise every day, as this encourages your body to sleep at night, and make sure your bedroom works for sleep – supportive mattress, comfortable temperature, and calm, uncluttered environment.
Attention Training
Attention is your most valuable asset at work – even a superpower – and yet many companies put unspoken cultural restraints on employees’ ability to use attention productively. Even so, there is a lot we can do as individuals to advance our attention, and with it, the ability to get our prime responsibilities handled well.
The trick is avoiding the interruptions and distractions – a.k.a. enemy agents – that fracture our attention, dumb/numb our brains, and take our focus off our most important work. We can do that by recognizing and counteracting the elements of distraction that threaten our success and satisfaction on the job.
