This post has been hanging around in a distant tab set for days: Monkeymagic: Excuse Me, Admiral. It says:
There is a new article out in the American Psychological Society's succinctly-titled Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. It's called "Executive Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching" and it's written by Joshua Rubenstein, David Meyer and Jeffrey Evans. In their experiment, they found out that people lost time when they had to switch from one task to another. No matter what the task, they lost time. Transitions weren't seamless.
Meyer noted that "not being able to concentrate for, say, tens of minutes at a time, may mean it's costing a company as much as 20 to 40 percent" in terms of potential efficiency lost."
Too right.
Staying focused when something is very challenging is essential to doing our best work (see Csikszentmihalyi on Flow). It is possible that our propensity for multi tasking is erroding our capacity for concentration, especially as its easier to do something else than to break through.
I agree. I find myself working on a dozen or more things at once (OSX's Expose feature has only made me worse in this respect), yet any major piece of work needs space, time and being cut off from email and RSS feeds. The ability to concentrate is vital, yet I suspect many people are losing it.
Brains are wired differently, but skill can be learned. Keeping a well-rounded skill set (define that one!) and flexibille approach can, perhaps, enable better interface with other people, conditions, projects, time frames, emergencies, innovation,etc. I like two points made above -- Tom's "banging tunes'" image reminds me of the power of art to communicate complexity and save time, and Lee's plea for teaching/learning powers of concentration. Mindfulness the is subject of self-healing studies underway at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.