When was the last time you sat down at the computer and just focused on one project, one issue, for one hour, without being distracted or checking your email, or finding out the latest celebrity gossip, or seeing how your sports team did, or finding a really funny video showing a cat water-skiing.

Yeah, I thought so. Me neither. But don’t worry. You are not alone. OK, we are not alone.

Short attention span

According to a new study, in the past decade the average attention span has dropped dramatically from 12 minutes to five minutes. Five minutes. That’s barely enough time to boil a hard-boiled egg. Hardly enough time to make a decent cup of tea. You wouldn’t even be halfway through the Derek and the Dominos classic  “Layla” (OK, that dates me) before your time is up.

The study says that today the average office worker checks their email 30 to 40 times an hour. An hour. It’s like a Pavlovian response. The little image appears in the corner of your screen or a sound goes off telling you there’s a new email in your inbox and you rush there to check it out. Odds are it’s going to be worthless or something that could have waited a few minutes, or quite  honestly a few hours, or days or weeks or you could even ignore it completely and life would go on. Yet still you feel the need to go and check it out right, right, now.

To delay might mean. Well, what!

Exactly. We are rushing around from one thing to another and not necessarily doing anything better or more skillfully or thoughtfully. All we are doing is doing it faster. The downside of that is that anything that forces us to slow down, or – god forbid – stop – then just drives us crazy. We’re addicted to speed. Addicted to multiple stimuli at the same time.

Addicted is the right word to use in this context. This new study found that social media may even be changing the way our brains work, re-wiring our circuitry, making us impatient and forgetful and distracted.

OK, what was I saying?

Slow down, let it sink in

Think about it. When was the last time you watched a video – other than a movie – that lasted more than a few minutes. How often do you just dismiss out of hand anything that looks as though it might take a few minutes to watch or read. How often do you just move on from an article that actually requires some real thinking, maybe even reading it a couple of times to understand it.

We are trying to save time. Instead we are losing our minds.

Did you ever read an article and think, ‘wow, that was really interesting, I must remember it” and then a week or so later you can barely remember the fact that you read it let alone any of the details? Well, I have discovered a great way to embed certain things in your brain permanently. Simply follow whatever it is you are trying to remember with a life or death experience!

That just happened to me. I just finished reading a fascinating article in the New Yorker magazine by Burkhard Bilger called “The Possibilian”. It was about a scientist called David Eagleman who was fascinated by – among other things – the perception of time slowing down at moments of heightened tension or drama. He had done a number of studies to try and understand what happened and how our brains reacted to these kinds of situations, and to see if in fact time did appear to slow down at extreme moments in our lives.

I could have saved him the bother because, today, I just proved it. The fabulous Shirley and I were driving back to San Francisco from the Russian River. It was a gorgeous early spring day, sun shining, hills a lush green landscape dotted with dazzling spring flowers. We took the quieter country road because we wanted to enjoy the scenery. A number of other cars had the same idea and soon there was a line of about six cars. As we neared a farm the front car indicated it was going to turn left into the driveway and slowed down, I was behind it and I slowed down. Unfortunately all the other drivers seemed to be too busy enjoying the scenery to notice what was happening up ahead because none of them showed any signs of stopping.

It’s a really rather uncomfortable feeling, sitting in your car, unable to move ahead without hitting the car in front, and seeing all these other cars coming at you very fast. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do, except, sit, and wait, and hope. Finally, the driver behind me saw what was happening and slammed on her brakes, and that started a cascade of red lights and screeching tires as each car in turn tried to avoid a pile-up.

The last car in the caravan wasn’t so fortunate. It was a big SUV and it was hauling a speed boat and it was going too fast to be able to stop in time. So, instead of piling into the car in front of him the driver steered his car to the side of the road, smashing through the long grass and flowers, narrowly missing all the other cars until he eventually came to a halt, level with us.

A quick look over and it was clear the folks in the car were shaken, but not hurt. They were incredibly lucky, had there been a ditch they would have almost certainly rolled over. Had there been a tree or fence in the way, they would have come to a much more abrupt halt. As it was, probably the only damage was to their nerves.

It all happened in a flash, a matter of seconds, yet it seemed to go on for ages. I can recall looking in the rear view mirror and seeing the look of terror on the face of the woman coming up fast behind me when she realized I had stopped. I can recall the individual sounds as the other drivers all took evasive action. And I can still hear in my head the shwssssshhhhhhh sound the last car made as it raced through the long grass and flowers.

The New Yorker article describes that moment perfectly; “in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down…. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity.”

And it’s true. I don’t recall being scared as I witnessed all this happening, just very aware that this was something over which I had no control. You become almost detached, standing off to the side watching your life take a direction you hadn’t planned on.

Suddenly the lessons and conclusions of the article were firmly embedded in my brain, not in my short-term but in my long-term memory. The piece itself goes on to follow Eagleman as he tried to answer the question “Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives? Does the brain shift gears for a few suspended seconds and perceive the world at half speed , or is some other mechanism at work?”

For me it was also a reminder that our lives are really rather precarious. Even when we do everything right, things may turn out wrong because we have no control over others. Their actions, as much as our own, determine what will happen to us. Our fate is in the hands of a man driving a large SUV, towing a big speed boat, who is not really paying attention to the world in front of him.

This time it worked out. But what about the next time. Or the time after that. And maybe the time after that the person not paying attention will be me. Will I be so lucky to react quickly enough to avoid a crash?

Hopefully this experience will make everyone involved in the different cars be more aware of what’s happening around them, what they are doing and what others are doing. Not just when they are driving but in other aspects of their life. Just to be focused on where you are and who you are with and what you are doing can really change the way you see the world around you. And change the way you see the people around you. And probably for the better.

As for the rest of the New Yorker article and its conclusions about time, well it’s fascinating stuff, and well worth reading.

As for me. I think I’ve done enough research for today. I need to go lie down.

When George ‘Dubya” Bush was holding the first Cabinet meeting of his administration Secretary of State Colin Powell, one of the most highly respected members of his administration, was running a little late. The fact that Powell was a decorated war hero cut little slack with the President. When he saw that Powell was late for the announced start time of the meeting he told his assistants to not only close the door but to lock it.

A few minutes later Secretary Powell came hurrying down the corridor and turned the handle to open the door to the Cabinet room. Can you imagine how he felt when the door wouldn’t open. Instantly he must have thought “oh crap”. But also imagine how everyone in the room, with the exception of the President felt. It was a powerful demonstration of naked power, saying to everyone, “I start meetings on time. Be here.”

You can bet no Cabinet member was ever let for a meeting ever again.

Running late

I was thinking about that the other day as I headed, a few minutes later than I’d wanted, to a meeting at a location half the way across San Francisco. I knew where I had to be. I knew when I had to be there. I knew why I had to be there. I knew when I had to leave my office to get there. But that last bit was the problem.

I had so many things to do I kept saying “I’ll just take care of this before I go.” or “I’ll just answer this email before I leave” or “I’ll just return this phone call” . Whatever the reason, the end result is I left a couple of minutes later than I planned so of course all the way over there I was thinking, “gosh darn it, running late again” (ok, so those probably weren’t exactly the words I chose but they convey how I felt).

Enough stress already

Why do we do that to ourselves? Life and certainly work is already stressful enough without adding more stress to the mixture. We have more things to do than we have time for. We have more work than we can handle. Yet we add an extra dollop of stress by constantly running late.

You see it all the time. People rushing down corridors to get to a meeting that was supposed to start five minutes ago. People driving too fast because they didn’t manage to get out of the house as early as they had planned (and then of course they get frustrated at every driver in front of them who is not equally in a hurry)

Take the time to be on time

So why don’t we take some of the pressure off ourselves, some of the stress out of our lives, and just leave a few minutes early?

First of all, it’s just good manners. If someone expects you to be somewhere at a given time why wouldn’t you show up then? It’s just rude not to and your mother taught you better than that.

But secondly, why not just give yourself a little extra breathing room. Be on time. Better still, be early. Think of what you could do with a few extra minutes. You could take the time to chat to other people who are also early. You could catch up on reading the newspaper or that wonderful book you have or some really trashy but fun magazine article you have been dying to get into. You could call your mum. You could call your  husband/wife/partner/lover/sister/brother etc.

Or you could just take a few minutes and sit there quietly, thinking about what you want to say in the meeting, what you want to get out of it.

The end result is less stress on you, and more results from life.

Why would you want anything less for yourself.

I love getting the New York Times on Sundays and devouring it, curled up in my favorite chair sipping a cup of coffee!  It’s a luxury to me to be able to “really” read the paper and absorb the stories rather than just race through and grab information from the newspaper while getting ready to go to work.   Sundays, I use the time to discover “new” ideas, different opinions, cultural trends and business practices.  This Sunday, while reading one of my favorite features, “Corner Office” I discovered an important message.

NYTimes reporter, Adam Bryant interviewed Cristobal Conde, the president of SunGard (a software technology company) Mr. Conde is an IT kind of guy and his company is built on how to make technology available to financial, higher education, and government agencies.  Now you would think Mr. Conde is a techie freak but he isn’t.  In fact, the lessons he learned as CEO of his company it all about relationships and thinking.  Mr. Conde says he tries to take 1 1/2 hours everyday just to close his office door and think.  My first thought when reading that was, “Wow, an hour and a half? Where does he find the time?”  Think about it, or do you have the time?

Mr. Conde “makes” the time.  He believes it is so important for his company’s future that he takes time to consider, contemplate, goof off in his mind.  It doesn’t matter what he thinks about but it is important to take the time.  Mr. Conde says, “Sometimes it gets cut short.  But many topics or issues can only be dealt with in an uninterrupted format.  I worry about our entry-level people- they’re bombarded with information, and they never get to think”.

Well friends, guess what, there is a study out about that!   Yes, Stanford researchers have found that people who are multitaskers, and by that I mean even folks who are instant messaging, writing a report, and listening to music or taking phone calls do not pay attention, control their memory, and are easily distracted from any focus on the array of tasks before them.  The study was published in the Aug 24 edition  of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Their findings show that multitasking actually impairs the organizing mechanisms in your brain.

100 Students in the study were put though a series of three tests,  half were self confessed heavy multitaskers and the others were low multitaskers.  After the tests the researcher found that the high taskers were constantly distracted by irrelevant information because they just couldn’t ignore it.  Follow up studies showed that high multitaskers had a low performance in  memory  and organizing information.  They just couldn’t filter out the irrelevant information. Plus, they didn’t take in enough information to contemplate with any depth of knowledge.

So there you have it, take it from a high tech guy like Cristobal Conde, if you really want to get ahead, take time to think, one thought at a time.  Still, how the heck does he find an hour and a half?  Maybe he’s lifting weights, or would that be multitasking?  How many tasks makes multi.  Hmmm, I’ll have to think about that.