Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life. Harvard Publications Health
While Senate Burns!” read one headline.
“Blame it on the BlackBerry!” crowed another.
Wrong—blame it on distraction. What cost Smith dearly, and plunged one of the largest states in America into one of the worst constitutional crises in its nearly 235-year history, was (besides maybe some bad manners) a lack of focus, divided attention.
The problem isn’t limited to the United States, either. One of the biggest scandals in the British tabloids in 2010—right up there with Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson’s admission that she accepted bribes to give business officials access to her influential ex-husband—involved a union official who, during emergency meeting negotiations with British Airway officials hoping to avoid a strike, sent Twitter messages—some at the rate of three or four an hour. When airline officials found out he was tweeting while they were supposed to be talking, they were furious; the negotiations broke down and the strike was on, disrupting travel plans for thousands of people on one of the world’s biggest airlines. “Twitter Blamed for Wrecking British Airway Peace Talks,” screamed London’s Daily Telegraph on its front page. Again, the wrong culprit: Twitter is not to blame. Rather, it’s a brain unable to stay focused even in a critical meeting that demonstrates an inability to put down a handheld device and look another human in the eye.
Still, at least, Malcolm Smith and the British union official weren’t behind the wheel of a car. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that at least 25 percent of all auto crashes involve some sort of driver distraction—and there are those who believe this number is steadily climbing as those distractions multiply with the addition of each new mobile communications device, every cell phone feature, every new satellite radio station, every new sign on the road.
But are the signs, the phones and the stations themselves really the problem? Once again, no.
The problem is that we can’t deal with them. The problem is that we can’t focus. The problem is that we’re overwhelmed and disorganized, and the net effect of the Distraction Crisis can be felt in the workplace, at home and in our individual health.
Some other distressing distraction-related statistics:
Forty-three percent of Americans categorize themselves as disorganized, and 21 percent have missed vital work deadlines. Nearly half say disorganization causes them to work late at least two times each week.1
A lack of time management and discipline while working toward [financial] planners’ professional goals contributes to 63 percent of those surveyed facing obstacles regarding their health. There is a direct correlation between too much stress, deteriorating health and poor practice management.2
Forty-eight percent of Americans feel that their lives have become more stressful in the past five years. About one-half of Americans say that stress has a negative impact on both their personal and professional lives. About one-third (31 percent) of employed adults have difficulty managing work and family responsibilities. And over one third (35 percent) cite jobs interfering with their family or personal time as a significant source of stress.3
In a Gallup poll, 80 percent of workers said they feel stress on the job, nearly half said they need help in learning how to manage stress and 42 percent said their coworkers need help coping with stress. Job stress can lead to several problems, including illness and injury for employees, as well as higher insurance costs and lost productivity for employers.4
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 80 percent of our medical expenditures are now stress-related.5
Seventy percent of employees work beyond scheduled time and on weekends; more than half cited “self-imposed pressure” as the reason.6
One specific category of disorganization or, to be precise, distraction has come to symbolize an era of divided attention: distracted driving. The Department of Transportation (DOT) has a special website dedicated to this problem (distraction.gov), in which readers are reminded about the perils of distracted driving, which is often thought of as just texting but also includes driving while talking on a cell phone, watching a video, reading a map or other behaviors that involve taking your eyes off the road or away from the safe operation of your vehicle.
The scope, effects and consequences of distracted driving are sobering, according to statistics compiled by DOT:
Using a cell phone while driving, whether it’s hand-held or hands-free, delays a driver’s reactions as much as having a blood alcohol concentration at the legal limit of .08 percent.7
Driving while using a cell phone reduces the amount of brain activity associated with driving by 37 percent.8
Nearly six thousand people died in 2008 in crashes involving a distracted driver and more than half a million were injured.9
The younger, inexperienced drivers under twenty years old have the highest proportion of distraction-related fatal crashes.
Drivers who use hand-held devices are four times as likely to get into crashes serious enough to injure themselves.10
Lest we assume, as many seem to do, that distracted driving is purely a problem of the young; teenagers and young adults who are checking their friends’ Facebook status while doing ninety miles per hour on the interstate, think again: almost half of adults who send text messages have sent them while driving, according to a 2010 study by the Pew Research Center (the same study found that about one-third of sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds admitted that they had done the same). According to distraction.gov, half of all people in the United States admit to cell phone use while driving; one in every seven admit to sending cell phone text messages while driving. These are also folks who should know better: 65 percent of drivers with a higher education text or talk while driving.
All in all, the distracted driving crisis—part of that larger Distraction Epidemic—seems to some a part of an even greater problem, suggesting that the human race has reached a point of information overload—or at least a point where we feel so overwhelmed by the demands of our lives that we would risk our lives for one more text or phone call. In 2010, The New York Times published a series of articles about the supposedly dire effects of technology on our brain. In a USA TODAY story on the issue, one researcher concluded gloomily that “people are multi-tasking probably beyond our cognitive limits.”
A DISTRACTED FACT OF LIFE?
Some say there’s little that can be done about all of this. The pace of life is increasing and the distractions multiplying. Get used to it. You’re powerless. To which we say, baloney! While we may not be able to slow down technological change or the speed with which life unfolds around us—and in some cases, why would we want to?—we very definitely can find a way to better manage ourselves, in order to not only deal with change and complexity but also thrive amidst it. This book is designed to show you how.
Remember: for every driver driven to distraction and for every stressed-out person who has lost an assignment, a job or a vital piece of information because he or she was disorganized and distracted, there are people on the opposite end of the spectrum. These are individuals who know how to use their brain’s abilities to organize their lives, to stay focused on the tasks at hand and to enjoy greater productivity—and pleasure!—at work and at home.
Some of them you probably know: athletes such as Derek Jeter or Tom Brady, famous for their ability to block out distraction and focus on the little white ball or the white line on the field ahead, public servants