When you’re up against it, taking a break might be the last thing on your mind.
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For most people it might be a case of trial and error to find what works for them, but since screening out distractions can be tiring, perhaps this is one to use sparingly, when all else has failed. The key is to give your mind just enough to do, so that your brain doesn't have the chance to look elsewhere for stimulation. There are a few apps, such as ommwriter or that add visual or musical distractions to order, but so far none have been tested in scientific studies and may be no better than putting the radio on. The problem with putting this into practice, however, is finding the right kind of distraction and keeping it on the right side of being overwhelming. It works because once all the perceptual slots have been taken up, the brain has to pour all its energies into focusing on the most important task. Lavie’s experimentssuggest we might be better to work not in clean, tidy and silent surroundings, but in those that are messy and confusing. The idea is that there is a limit to how much information from the outside world our brains can process at any one time – once all of these processing ‘slots’ have been filled, the brain’s attention system kicks in to decide what to focus on. Nilli Lavie, a psychologist at University College London, came up with what she calls ‘Load Theory’ in 1995. To concentrate properly you must get rid of all external distractions, right? Actually, according to one influential theory of attention, the opposite is true. “Of course this isn’t a blank cheque to watch cat videos all day, but taking the occasional break to joke around is useful, especially when you are feeling really tired.” “Creating a culture of fun in your team – where you deliberately find something funny to laugh at, like a funny email or YouTube video would be one way of helping you to boost your work productivity,” says David Cheng, a leadership researcher at the Australia National University in Canberra, who led the research. The study concluded that humour replenishes our reserves so effectively that workplaces should encourage a more “playful” culture. In experiments, people who had watched a funny video tried longer and harder to complete an impossible puzzle than a control group of people who watched a video that was relaxing but not funny. According to a recent study, a good way to boost your reserves of willpower is to have a good laugh. This is because, no matter how much you love your job, staying focused on something difficult requires willpower. Giving yourself permission to think about anything but work not only takes the guilt out of mind wandering, it also helps tick a few things off the mental to-do list that caused the mind wandering in the first place.
“Think about something unrelated, maybe problem-solve something else that you've got on your mind and then come back to your task,” suggests Seli.
This suggests that deliberately letting your mind off the hook now and again might pay dividends. “If the task is easy, intentionally mind wandering will likely not result in performance costs, but it should afford people the opportunity to reap the benefits of mind wandering, such as problem-solving and planning,” he says. People who slot in their daydreaming when they know that it won’t matter – when doing mindless admin, for example, suffer less than those whose minds skip off without their say-so, says Seli. So if it’s going to happen, then why not schedule it at a convenient time? Paul Seli, a psychologist at Harvard University, has distinguished between deliberate and accidental mind wandering, and says that only the accidental kind is bad for getting stuff done.
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