The Impact of New Working Practices on Focus and Balance

The Modern Workplace

The modern workplace is undergoing a major trend towards home offices and telecommuting, with sophisticated teleconferencing solutions and other collaborative technologies that allow high level interactions anywhere in the world at any time.  Smartphones have become practically an appendage for most of us; we seldom have our device in a separate room from where we are physically located these days.  With this shift in working practices, it is important that we do have some distinction between work time and non-work time and that we recognize that work literally has its place.  We have to shift our attention to making our working time more effective and productive, rather than continue blurring work time with the other elements of our life.  It’s imperative that we have a chance to switch off and recover.

To maintain a sense of balance in today’s technologically connected world, it’s important to manage your priorities, so that you can focus on each area and give it your full attention for a specified period of time.  If you focus on one task at a time sequentially, rather than bouncing back and forth among multiple tasks, you will produce better and more satisfying results in less time.  This explodes the myth of multi-tasking..

We have let ourselves believe that because we can respond to multiple stimuli all at the same time that we can multitask, but in fact the human brain can attend to only one higher level task at a time.  We need to be able to focus on one thing at a time, particularly if it is something with any degree of complexity.  If it is chewing gum and ironing at the same time, you can do that without sacrificing performance in either area, but if you are trying to hold a conversation with someone while watching an educational video, you are not going to function well in either.

To have balance you need to be able to give each area of life its due focus and then you will be better able to experience some measure of effectiveness and accomplishment in each of the important areas of your life.  Mastering this in the current era of home offices, tablet computers and smartphones requires practice and discipline and the rewards are many.