Correos, ‘whatsapps’, alertas, reuniones... por qué el nuevo lujo laboral es mantener la concentración más de una hora

Correos, WhatsApp, alerts, meetings... why the new luxury of work is maintaining concentration for more than an hour. The increasing use of technology devices such as notifications, WhatsApp, emails, calls, and meetings is fragmenting employees' attention, according to research from the University of California. Gloria Mark, a researcher at the university, found that the amount of time a person stays focused on a task before switching to another has decreased from 2.5 minutes to just 47 seconds in less than two decades.

This has made concentration the most valuable commodity in the workplace of the artificial intelligence era. Constant distractions have a significant cognitive cost. It takes nearly 24 minutes for our brains to completely disengage from the previous activity and focus on the new one, known as residual attention. Deep work, a bestseller by Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, outlines four basic rules for integrating deep attention into our lives.

The monastic rule involves isolating oneself for days or weeks to focus on a single task that requires full attention, eliminating superficial tasks. Many entrepreneurs, including Bill Gates, apply this method during their famous reading weeks. The bimodal model alternates periods of deep concentration with less demanding work. This is likely the most commonly used model in the workplace, where professionals often set aside one day a week for concentration.

The rhythmic model reserves daily, time-constrained blocks for tasks requiring greater attention. The final model is the journalistic one, where professionals with no set hours take advantage of any available moment to work on tasks that demand a higher level of concentration.