Artificial Intelligence can do a lot of things, but it can’t keep humans from distractions like social media and the tyranny of now…
Ask Google search how artificial intelligence is going to change the way we work and you’ll get an answer along the lines of: “AI can handle repetitive and time-consuming tasks… . This frees employees to focus on more strategic and creative aspects of their jobs, ultimately boosting productivity and job satisfaction.”
Really?
The first part of that response is clearly true.
You can go to the hospital one morning to get a chest X-ray that an AI program can read in the blink of an eye, identify abnormalities and other aspects, compose a detailed description, fire off a full report to your doctor, and then post it to your online medical chart—all before you get back home.
AI is more efficient than a teacher in a classroom with a workbook trying to teach subjects like foreign languages. AI can design a program to operate the signals at a busy intersection that results in fewer traffic jams and accidents.
Consumer-facing companies use it to generate personalized marketing programs, predict customer behavior, and recommend beauty and apparel products based on an individual’s skin tone and body type.
What AI can’t do (yet, anyway) is cope with human afflictions such as our addiction to distraction, especially our cell phones, our obsession with social media, and that sense urgency we all feel these days to promptly respond to text messages lest the sender think they are being ignored.
The speed of the digital life has reached a velocity that exceeds our ability to manage it efficiently.
We are living under a tyranny of now, as in “right now.”
It is shredding workplace efficiency, creating workplace dissatisfaction, and costing employers billions in lost productivity.
A survey last year by workforce software company Insightful revealed what it described as an “epidemic of lost focus in the modern workplace.” The survey of 1,200 employees and their managers found that more than 90% of employers named lost focus a major problem. Findings included: 80% of employees can’t go an hour without being distracted; two-thirds said they check messages and emails more than 10 times a day; and nearly seven of 10 employees reported experiencing burnout in the preceding year.
The frictionless world that technology makes possible is convenient. We can multitask, answering emails while participating in a Zoom conference. We can drive to work while talking on the phone. We can monitor multiple social media accounts while creating new content.
But are we really getting more done in less time?
The concept of multitasking originally referred to the power of a computer to perform two processes at the same time. Now it’s a buzzword, a cliché, and a skill considered so discrete and essential it has earned a twig on the corporate tree. Check the help wanted job sites and you’ll see headlines like, “Executive Assistant, Energetic Captain of Multitasking.”
What to do about it?
For starters, stop believing in the notion that you are a master multitasker. You’re just too busy to do any one task efficiently. Social scientists and researchers have been giving the concept the thumbs down for the past two decades.
One of the early debunkers was a Harvard medical professor and psychiatrist, Edward M. Hallowell, who in 2006 described multitasking as a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously as effectively as one.”
Hallowell wrote a book, “CrazyBusy,” about the emerging role of cellphones in ramping up the pace of life and its connection to phenomena such as the rising number of cases of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). You can talk on the phone while writing an email, Hallowell said, but you won’t be doing either task as effectively as doing them one at a time.
In 2018, a Stanford University psychology professor, Anthony Wagner, published a research paper based on a decade of data collected by a colleague about multimedia multitasking. Wagner had been skeptical of research suggesting multitasking was a problem and wanted to see if empirical evidence would agree.
After sorting through the data, he was not only convinced but alarmed by what he was seeing.
Heavy media multitaskers performed poorly on simple memory tasks, had trouble paying attention, recalling information, or switching from one task to another. They were less productive than people who limited their distractions.
AI is a powerful tool, but it needs to be used to help us focus on what is our competitive advantage and let it unclutter us from all the noise. The first step would be to put down the phone and learn what AI can and cannot do for you. Professional race car drivers have a saying…”Sometimes you need to SLOW DOWN, to go FAST.”
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