Focus: A Dynamic Strategy for Greater Career Success

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth to help you advance in your career. Today we're speaking with Maggie Jackson, who is the author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, which is kind of scary, Maggie, but …. Well, I know we'll get into that. She is an award-winning author and journalist who writes the popular “Balancing Act” column in the Boston Globe.

Her work has also appeared in The New York Times and National Public Radio, and many other national publications. Her first book was called What's Happening at Home, which is about the loss of home as a refuge. It sounds like the two topics are very, very interrelated. I mean, we're so distracted because we're always on call.

Maggie Jackson: Yes, that's a great point. And these are two topics that are incredibly crucial to human life and yet are undervalued in so many ways and overlooked to actually know what attention is, even as we run around in a quote unquote ADD culture.

Anita Brick: It's true. And I think today especially, it seems like employers want you to be incredibly focused because they want to hire the absolute perfect fit. But people are trying to go after many, many, many different things. Being focused and having attention is so very difficult. Where do we even start with job search to focus our attention when there's so many things vying for it?

Maggie Jackson: Well, first we need to recognize how important focus is, because we do live in a culture that values frenetic multitasking and information glut through Google searches. We really live in a culture that values inattention in a certain way. So I think we need to rekindle an awareness of how important focus is. Sometimes 20, 30, or 200 job searches will actually reap less than fewer. That is an epiphany, I think in an age of, as I say, information overload. A start is to understand why we need focus.

Anita Brick: OK, so tell us, why do we even need focus? How is that going to help me? Intuitively, it seems like if I'm focused on just a few things, I'm going to get less done.

Maggie Jackson: First of all, we need to recognize the inefficiencies of multitasking and living in a kind of interrupt-driven, speed-driven way. It doesn't mean that we can all pull back, move into the forest, and become monks. No, of course not. We're in the 21st century, and it's a complex age. But at the same time, multitasking again and again has been shown in the research to be inefficient.

For many listeners, this won't be precisely news, but yet we really need to change our behavior. And for instance, understand that when you're doing complex things or important social engagement, multitasking—either doing two things at once or switching back and forth between two tasks—is inefficient. More than half of people now, and I think this is probably a growing figure, check email while they're on their phone with another.

This is not a great thing to do, especially when you're job hunting. You really need to attend to the task at hand or pay attention to who you're talking to, especially in those important conversations. When you slow down a little bit, multitask in a judicious way, take time, perhaps at the beginning of your day, to insert a little reflective, quiet time.

Actually, this will ripple through your days, give you the perspective that you need to have longer vision or choice and planning and decision-making. And I'll tell you one neuroscientific reason for this, one evidence is that there are now three types of attention. There's focus, which is the spotlight of your mind. You know, we all know what it feels like to concentrate on a problem.

We all know how rare that is these days. And then there's awareness, which is wakefulness, awareness of your surroundings. And you need to be highly aware when you're in a face-to-face job interview, or when you're on the telephone, to the nuances of your interviewer's voice and body language and what's going on in that company you're visiting.

And then thirdly, there's executive attention. That's actually a higher-order package of skills related to planning and vision, etc.—everything you need to carry out a good career or a good job hunt. So these are all skills we cannot afford to undermine when we're job hunting.

Anita Brick: So how do we develop them? I mean, I've heard of people who will have a conversation with one person and be twittering on their BlackBerry to another. We've been trained to do that. Now, how do we retrain ourselves to have that kind of attention on those three dimensions that you're just talking about?

Maggie Jackson: Well, there are two ways to do this. Again, I have to underscore the issue of recognition. You know, we really need to understand the costs of working this way. And you mentioned a social, multitasking moment. We really undermine our ability to come together as human beings. Co-presence, which is really a mutual attention, is a starting point for social relations.

Again, whether you're connecting virtually or face to face, you just cannot develop the kind of synchronicity, the beautiful music of relationships that you need in the business world or in your home life if you are constantly only half present. So we really need to wake up to that.

Second, in terms of social recognition, the connections that we make these days are phenomenally multiplicitous. We connect with millions globally. That's wonderful. We do it instantaneously, but we're really cultivating breadth, not depth. So that's another, you know, sort of raw awakening that we need to make.

Anita Brick: And what are the implications of that?

Maggie Jackson: The implications are, once again, that we're connecting with snippets and glimpses. We're giving short shrift to these deeper connections. And this is why people are hungry for deeper moments of relationships. Again, whether it's at home or in the business world, the deeper connections are the ones that reap the jobs, the promotion, the business opportunities. If you're sort of half aware, disconnected, half present, you're not going to be really aware of when that tiny little turning point in a relationship or a conversation occurs. Again, this happens throughout our days.

We think that being hurried and frenetic and doing 300 things versus 30 is good. But actually, you know, these develop into habits that really make us into rats in a cage. I mean, truly, you're scattered, you're uncentered, you're even impulsive. And the cost to us—and I'm talking both sociologically and biologically—what is ADD? It's actually a condition that's related to impulsiveness, lack of ability to plan for the future, promoting instant gratification, etc., etc.

Now, if we are symptomatic in these ways, the costs are really high.

Anita Brick: Problems we're in today seem like they are the outgrowth.

Maggie Jackson: Precisely. The way we've been operating in many different industries, but especially in the business world, is thoughtless in many ways. There's so many different fingers that can point in so many different ways. But distraction and inattention, and the style and the social style that we've developed, are absolutely integral to why we're in this mess today. I'm absolutely convinced of this.

And so I talked a little bit about the social ramifications. But we also need to recognize, again, at work, how we're problem solving. So, for instance, a high number of interruptions during the day has been correlated in research again and again with stress, with frustration, and also with lower creativity, which makes sense. I mean, that's why the only time we seem to be able to get a little epiphany, a light bulb going off in our head, is in the shower these days.

And this is why people say, oh, I need to go home to work. They mean to actually get anything done. So this is a sign that our work environment—there must be something off kilter. When we feel so scattered, so diffused, we're not able to actually problem solve. Again, as human beings and as business people, we need to push back on that.

The second way in which we need to move forward to create—what I'm calling for is a renaissance of attention—is, you know, after you move past the recognition, to actually take steps. And this can be done—we can take steps individually and collectively; for instance, in workplaces. And, you know, if you're job hunting, do this with a networking group or do it with your family life or with the people you know, put these issues on the table.

Start discussing the ideas of focus and attention and distraction. And especially in a workplace, you can make some collective steps. I hear that this is being done. You know, for instance, the gadgets in meetings. This is a pretty simple guideline that people can hammer out in the workplace to try to allow people to have that kind of shared focus, which is really the point of the meeting.

You know, that's really—how can people brainstorm when they're only half there? Again, they're giving themselves sort of cognitive lobotomies.

Anita Brick: Well, no, but it's a good—it's a really good point. And I know that one of the things that we started—this past Monday, we had the opportunity to offer students and alumni who were unemployed, space to go that was quiet away from their kitchen table, away from the distractions. They might be lovely distractions in the form of children, but they were distractions nonetheless.

And what happened immediately? I mean, they were very happy to be in this space and to have that focus, but they immediately started to connect with one another. So the focus sometimes can be in that small group too.

Maggie Jackson: Exactly. And this is why some companies are starting actual physical spaces. It's sometimes called white space. And these places are usually unwired. It's a room that is converted for, not just meetings really, but for actually brainstorming or for connecting and just the way you are talking about this, and also for thinking what you've precisely hit upon, what I call a very important rule of thumb for creating attention and focus.

And that is, set the stage for focus. You know, it's one thing—and I'll talk in a minute about the internal resources we need to pay attention. We need to be attentional athletes in this era. And that's really important. But first we need to set the stage for focus. I mean, if you're trying to do your PhD in Times Square, well, you are actually undermining your own ability to pay attention and focus.

And so setting aside a work area or rethinking how you work, you know, I hide some visual distractions when I'm doing the most complex writing that I have, or I'm working on deadline, I actually change the physical workspace that I am in just to set that stage for focus. One wonderful idea, or practice, actually, that IBM has is called Think Fridays.

This is not a physical room, but it's actually a day in which different departments and people can pull back from meetings, conference calls, even email. The beauty of this practice—first of all, it's grassroots. It's never been a CEO-demanded mandatory practice, and it's also interpreted differently according to different departments or individuals. So in other words, people in teams in China actually use IBM Think Fridays to practice English.

It's just something they need to focus on. They get too scattered and interrupted during the week, and they want to do this kind of creative and important work, so they reserve it for Fridays. That's a wonderful, wonderful idea, I think.

Anita Brick: It's interesting because it sounds like you need that space. And it seems, especially with jobs, there are all the distractions that we have. And then there's also the mental distraction, I think promoted by a lot of things in the media, people talking to one another who have had negative experiences where they're not getting much traction.

It does focus our attention, but it focuses our attention in the wrong way. So how do we actually refocus so that we have the internal wherewithal to move ahead with a job search?

Maggie Jackson: That's very, very key. Well, I'd say one very important goal for people who are job searching is to get back in the driver's seat of their attention. Distraction actually needs to be pulled away, too.

Anita Brick: So I get that. I understand that, I really do, but I think it's really hard. I mean, I think it's a wonderful thing to shoot for, but how do you do it practically at a granular level, so that people can take small steps toward that because they're bombarded from every direction with rejection, with things in the market. Tell us very practically, how do we do it?

Maggie Jackson: Getting back in the driver's seat of your attention is absolutely core. You know, for instance, you need to understand that people are interrupt-driven by nature. So therefore, when you're taking a call, when you're jumping for the next email, it might look proactive, but actually you're living in a reactive way. You're reacting to external stimuli, external distractions. I think it's really important to just be aware of the fact that you need to not jump to every email, not jump to every single noise or beep coming in.

Set the stage for focus, as we talked about, but set aside time when you're only reacting to what you want to react to, and then just thinking about your priority or your agenda for the day or the morning. You know, I think that's not rocket science, but, you know, then you can start the day so that you're not being sort of a human pincushion for interruptions.

Those are some practices that can help socially. I think that you can practice something called active listening. Listening is an attentional skill. We think that it's really easy, but it demands critical thinking, patience, and self-control. It's being taught at companies. And that's very, very, very important for socially connecting. For instance, when you're listening, don't be thinking just about what you need to ask or do.

You just need to be totally open to what the other person is saying, and you'll be amazed at how much deeper you can get into the conversation. The act of listening is one other further way we can actually develop our powers of focus and attention.

Anita Brick: It's a very good point, and you get lots of good information if you actually do.

Maggie Jackson: Oh, exactly. You're not missing, you know, part of the message.

Anita Brick: And I think that most people are not listened to. And so if you do practice active listening, people tend to like you more or want to help you more because you make them feel good.

Maggie Jackson: Precisely.

Anita Brick: … because you're paying attention.

Maggie Jackson: Exactly. And you're also more empathetic. You know, this is an incredibly important skill in today's marketplace. As we have been talking about, sometimes you don't get that face to face interview. You're doing it virtually or by telephone. You already have fewer clues to what—either your informational interviewer or the executive recruiter, whoever is at the other end of the line, so to speak—you have fewer clues to what's really going on and what they're really trying to tell you. So you need to be completely alert, aware, and on your toes when you're doing that. And active listening is a very, very important point for job seekers.

Anita Brick: How do you break the addiction to the multitasking, get as many things done, carry two laptops, a BlackBerry and an iPhone? I mean, how do you help people or what would you suggest that people do if they're addicted to that? Because some people feel important because of that.

Maggie Jackson: Oh, yes. And also we human beings get a little jolt of hormonal kick when we see new stimuli. And so that's one reason why the new new thing is the new ping, the new beep. The new gadget is always alluring to us. You know, we're sort of bred that way. that makes us survive in any environment as human beings. And yet you're right. It's addictive.

Again, you don't have to turn over a new leaf completely. You really don't have to be a different person. You just have to make a few inroads. People used to be afraid of flexibility, and then they realized that actually flexibility for some people meant just leaving at 3 p.m. on Friday in July. That's all. A really small step can make a big, big difference in people's lives.

And the same with attention and focus and distraction. I mean, I'm just as distracted as anyone, and I spent four years researching writing a book about this topic. I find that—I’ve got wireless in my house, and it's really hard to keep from, you know, moving over to my email when I'm supposed to be writing something.

So we all have to keep working at it. We have to be tenacious with it, and we have to just take small baby steps. And you'd be surprised—as I mentioned, take a moment at the beginning of your day to think about what you want to do that day, rather than just trying to plunge through the email, or try not to answer the email every hour—actually, give it a few hours.

Carve out some time, especially when you've got something important to do. Focus on that person you're talking to completely and utterly. I mean, you know how that feels, and you can do it even if it's just once a day. So these are some small steps. And small steps really will give you perspective and a sort of sense of calm in this difficult ocean of change. We're enduring.

Anita Brick: Have you seen people become successful on their own terms because they started paying more attention?

Maggie Jackson: Well, I do notice that anecdotally, there's so many stories of executives or successful people who are calm and focused. And, you know, sometimes they actually meditate. That's just one practice we can use to learn to train our attention. I do notice that, you know, many of the great thinkers, the great inventors, the great explorers were, a) willing to sacrifice in order to get that reflective thinking time.

I read an article once. It was interviews with MacArthur fellows, the people who get the genius grants. They said that they were to a person incredibly fiercely protective of their down time. For instance, when they were walking down the street, they didn't make a phone call. They actually just reserve that for thinking time. And that was really an interesting article for me.

You know, we can preserve … in a lot of ways, I think of this as an environmental movement, not just a kind of self-improvement idea, that we need to pay more attention. We also need to change our environment. We've created this screen-saturated, kind of hyperactive, media-saturated environment. And you know what? We can change it.

Anita Brick: Good point. So if you were in a job search mode at this moment and you were finding that you were feeling pulled in so many different directions, you just got stuck—what are three things that you would do immediately to give yourself the space to kind of move ahead again?

Maggie Jackson: Well, I would carve out a certain amount of time in my day just for reflection and thinking and perspective. Could be in the middle of the day, could be at the end of the day or the beginning of the day, you know? Secondly, I would make sure that I was parsing my informational searches in a focused way.

In other words, the more is not better, when it comes to Googling and searching and sending out resumes, etc., etc. Focused, laser-like—really shooting your arrow to the right target, I think is far more important. And that's a form of attention. and also just simply take care of myself. We are holistic beings, and we are not cognitive robotic job hunting machines.

We really need to take time to destress, take time to eat healthily, get lots of sleep, and, you know, pay attention to the rest of what's going on in our life. Whether that's children or friends, make connections. So cultivate the sort of total garden of yourself, and that will help your job hunt. And that's the kind of challenge of focus as well.

Anita Brick: Do you have time for one more question?

Maggie Jackson: Sure.

Anita Brick: OK. That's very good advice, because you need this space in order to really plan and organize and just like get mentally prepared. If you were going to an event tonight and you knew that there were going to be people who could potentially help you in your job search, what would be some things you would do to prepare? And once you got there, how would you proceed?

Maggie Jackson: I think that I would try to do as much homework as I could before going in. So do some focused, smart homework, as we all know we should do when we're job hunting at every step of the way. I would just try to stay calm. I mean, if—when you get to this event, if you're talking to one person who seems to be a possible resource and you are learning and this is a good connection, then don't feel compelled to move through 49 other connections in the next 15 minutes.

In other words, focus when you're there. It's difficult. That's called the cocktail party syndrome. Our eyes and ears travel all over the place. I think you'll get more if you can really focus on that individual. And in a lot of ways this is called giving the gift of attention. The gift of attention is really important in all parts of our lives.

You know, William James, the great philosopher, psychologist from the early 20th century who was one of the first people to write about attention, once said, wisdom is the art of knowing what to overlook. So this is really important. No matter whether you're doing that informational homework research before you go to an event, or whether you're using your time wisely, when you are there, wisdom is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Anita Brick: That's great, and thank you. Thank you for writing this. It’s very interesting, very timely. And what's next for you?

Maggie Jackson: Well, I'm still working on the science of attention, and there might be a second book in there that helps people learn a little bit more about how to focus.

Anita Brick: Excellent. Well, thank you. Thank you very, very much for taking the time. I know you're very busy.

Maggie Jackson: My pleasure, Anita. And, thank you and good luck to all, all the listeners.

Anita Brick: Great. Maggie actually has a great site. There's more information up there. Her site is Maggie-Jackson.com. And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.