# 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. ## **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, 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.) ## **8 Reasons Why You Can't Focus at Work** _1._ [**Time Management**](/content/blog/the-enemies-of-time-and-attention/#A/index.html) 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. _2._ [**Interruptions**](/content/blog/the-enemies-of-time-and-attention/#B/index.html) 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. _3._ [**Faux Urgency**](/content/blog/the-enemies-of-time-and-attention/#C/index.html) When we grant immediacy to things that don’t require it, 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. _4._ [**Distractions**](/content/blog/the-enemies-of-time-and-attention/#D/index.html) 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. _5._ [**Multitasking**](/content/blog/the-enemies-of-time-and-attention/#E/index.html) 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. _6._ [**Clutter**](/content/blog/the-enemies-of-time-and-attention/#F/index.html) Visual clutter is unsettling to the brain. It raises anxiety levels and adds confusion to your purpose. _7._ [**Avoidance**](/content/blog/the-enemies-of-time-and-attention/#G/index.html) 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. _8._ [**Insufficient Sleep**](/content/blog/the-enemies-of-time-and-attention/#H/index.html) 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, but also we have trouble concentrating, learning, and remembering. ### **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.