Are You Addicted to Distraction?

Question of the day: When working on a project (or two or three), do you leave your Outlook/Yahoo/Hotmail new mail indicators on -- and check those messages as they come in?

Admit it: You may even get a buzz from doing more than one thing at once. Relax, you’re in good company. It’s that immediate-gratification factor -- kind of like your morning caffeine fix or this generation’s retail therapy. More and more, it seems that this stage of history (ADD AD), in which success and promptness are intuitively intertwined, distraction has morphed into what we euphemistically label as multitasking.

A recent Time Magazine article cites that in a study of 1,000 office workers (from managers to cubicle dwellers), it was found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours in a day, or 28 percent of the workday. These two-plus hours include not only the actual time of the distraction but also recovery time (i.e., time needed to refocus your brain on the project at hand). Hence, (for those who are nuts over numbers) it is estimated that these distractions cost the US economy $588 billion. So while we think we’re getting a lot done, we’re actually doing less.

But what’s more interesting is that we love these distractions -- literally. It is speculated that every time we shift our attention from, say, responding to an email to answering the phone to editing a story, our brain releases a shot of dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in seeking rewards and stimulation. This is probably why some refer to their BlackBerries as CrackBerries.

So retire your trigger finger, and let those emails pile up -- well, at least schedule a time (even if it’s once an hour or two) to check them. And see how much more quality work you end up churning out.

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