Around one and half years back, after completing my marketing session to executive
MBA students, few of them came to me with different queries related to topic. However, one
of them had an off topic query. His name was Rohan and he was working with an MNC from
around two and half years with decent performance records. But of late, he was not very
much satisfied with his own work performance, as he was not able to manage the multitasking and further not able to complete his work in a desired way within the given time. So, he wanted to understand how he can manage his work more productively and improve his
work performance.
Now-a-days we often hear from the youth and from some mid-age group people also,
about their challenges in either managing time or not able to complete some work in a
reasonable time duration. Some of them might not be planning & scheduling their work
properly, but there some other people like Rohan, who even after preparing a plan & schedule
in advance do not able to complete their work on time. One of the common reasons for the
same is distractions. As per findings of American Psychological Association’s survey conducted
in 2017, being continuously and regularly active on internet, social media channels, text
message exchanges and several other activities on different devices are associated with
higher stress levels. These kind of habits results in continuous partial attention to multiple
activities, thus such people do not able to pay their full attention to any specific thing or
activity.
This is where the importance of ‘Attention management’ comes into picture.
Attention management is about controlling distractions and achieving the flow in your work,
where you would feel completely involved and focused in that specific task. Achieving such
flow for a longer duration gives people utmost satisfaction and fulfilment at the end of any
working day, and further results in better productivity and improved performance. Thus, it is
imperative to give more priority to attention and concentration over time, because quality of
attention and concentration highly influences the quality of experience, which further
impacts the overall quality of life.
While managing the attention, it is essential to address the issue of ‘Attention
Residue’. It is a concept developed by Dr. Sophie Leroy, Professor at University of Washington.
In the words of Leroy “Attention residue is when thoughts about a task persist and intrude
while performing another task”. For instance, if you are making a presentation, and in
between your phone notifies few messages from your friends on some interesting topic, may
be some outing or a movie plan on the weekend. Due to such distractions your attention will
shift from presentation to weekend plan, at least for few minutes. Further, when you will
come back to presentation task, it will take some time to shift your attention and completely
refocus on the task. Such multiple residues throughout the day adversely impacts your overall
task performance.
Prof. Krunal K. Punjani
Assistant Professor,
DR V N BRIMS, Thane
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