People Have Changed. Why Hasn’t Work?

You do not need to search far for research that finds how the human mind has been rewired by the unfettered accessibility of always-on information (aka the Internet).*

Any whim can be explored. Curiosity is solved with a few clicks. And the time suck is omnipresent.

The Internet — which is the greatest distraction ever created — is always at your fingertips. While companies may create guardrails (blocking certain sites and tampering down streaming quality to crawls), your average employer has not done much to combat this.

The average workday is a minefield of distractions from your computer, your mobile phone and, thanks to open offices, your own coworkers. In short, your daily workday is a losing battle for productivity.

And it’s not as if employees are looking to actively avoid work. The aimless Internet browsing is now just baked into most people’s habits. If you finish a task or get stuck in the of middle one, you’re liable to check out what’s happening on Facebook or Twitter, or your RSS reader, or a random website. Years ago, only the most brazen desk jockey would prop their feet up on their desks and read People when they should have been working. But that’s basically what a majority of employees are doing today. And doing for far longer than they care to imagine.

Access to the Internet is often times required — or at least beneficial — to one’s job, but the Internet is all-encompassing and never-ceasing. It’s too easy for anyone to start a legitimate work task and end up down a rabbit hole of extracurricular activities.

But to ban the Internet is too Draconian (a definitive recruitment or retention killer) and an IT department of thousands could never handle the variable blocking that would eliminate all but relevant work-related sites and services).

And even if companies did eliminate the Internet distraction, the first issue remains. Our brains are fundamentally changing. Companies are bleeding productivity because our attention spans are lessoning, and there’s less and less structure to our jobs and our days. If you believe our brains are structured to only handle short bursts of productivity (and we should use, for instance, the Pomodoro Technique — 45 minutes of concentrated activity and 15 minutes of rest), employees are expected to employ this on their own.

Few companies go beyond introducing their employees to time management skills, and don’t put in the work to structure days around it. It might seem lame, but what if a company structure their work around a 45-min on, 15-min off schedule, where the end of the 45 minutes actually involved a horn. Spitballing here, but companies have no problem enacting a ton of code of conduct policies around any number of things, but not on how employees structure their time.

It’s only going to become a bigger problem. I’d love your thoughts on it in the comments.

* Yes, I got distracted during the writing of this article and spent 10 minutes browsing something wholly unrelated.