What you’ll learn:
- Attention is easily distracted
- Need to focus? Clear the mind.
- Distractions exhaust the brain
- Being “always on” (connected to others via technology) drops your IQ significantly, as much as losing a night’s sleep
Your brain is a distraction junkie. You’ve been conditioned to be hooked on the quick hit of a notification, the cheap thrill of the unread email, the sweet relief of anything that isn’t the actual work you’re supposed to be doing. Studies show the average worker loses over two hours a day to distractions. Eleven minutes into a task, and boom, someone’s Teams message derails your focus. After the interruption, it takes 25 minutes to return to the original task.
The outside world isn’t just competing for your attention, it’s outright stealing it. Every ping, every pop-up is basically a pickpocket lifting your focus straight out of your brain. The fix is stupidly simple, turn off your devices. The brain wants to focus, it just needs you to stop shoving shiny objects in its face. The world will always demand your attention, the question is: why are you going to give it away for free?
Attention is easily distracted
The biggest distraction in your life likely isn’t your phone, your coworkers, or the endless parade of notifications, it’s you. That’s right. Your own brain is a masterful con artist, convincing you that reorganizing your desktop at 3pm is urgent while the actual work you’re getting paid to do gets shoved aside for another mental rerun of That Time Some Junior Employee Pissed You Off.
You tell yourself you’ll just “quickly” reply to that Teams message. You swear up and down that it’ll “only take a second” to tidy up your files. You’re performing an elaborate magic trick where avoidance disguises itself as productivity. The worst part is, you’re the only one who’s fooled.
Your mind would rather chew on old grievances, obsess over trivial nonsense, or even fantasize about professionally ruining some clueless underling than sit with the discomfort of actually doing the work. Focus is hard, distraction is easy. Your brain is the lazy, drama-loving diva that takes the past of least resistance, always.
The problem is the “quick” reply to the slack message isn’t multitasking, it’s self-sabotaging. Until you stop letting your inner monologue hijack your attention, you’ll keep spinning your wheels, convincing yourself you’re too “busy” while the real priorities collect dust.
Distractions exhaust the brain
Trey Hedden and John Gabrieli are two MIT neuroscientists who wanted to figure out why we’re all so distracted. What they found was equal parts obvious and depressing: when your mind wanders, you suck at whatever you’re doing. And it doesn’t even matter what you’re doing—you could be solving equations or folding laundry, and if your brain decides to take a detour into “Hey, remember that time you embarrassed yourself in 7th grade?”, your performance tanks.
This mental wandering isn’t a random misfire. It’s your medial prefrontal cortex in action. The medial prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain right behind your forehead that lights up whenever you start thinking about yourself (or other people, but be real, mostly yourself). This region is part of the default network that fires up when you’re not focusing on anything in particular. For example, between tasks, when you’re zoning out in a meeting, or you’re supposed to be working but instead are lost in your head replaying last night’s TV show.
Your brain is wired to get distracted by itself. External distractions—emails, Teams pings, your coworker’s obnoxious keyboard clacking—are one thing. But the real enemy is inside your head. Maybe your brain’s running low on glucose (because you skipped breakfast like an idiot). Maybe you’re trying to juggle too many thoughts at once (your brain can only hold about four things at a time, so good luck with that). Either way, the second your focus slips, your default network swoops in like an overeager intern, flooding your consciousness with useless self-reflection and random memories instead of, you know, the thing you’re supposed to be doing.
Being “always on” is not a good thing
Here’s a fun question: What do you call someone who’s always available?
Answer: A doormat.
Think about it. You’re the go-to person for everyone—family, friends, coworkers, clients. Last-minute favor? You’re their guy. Emotional dumping ground? You’ve got the ears. On the surface, it feels good to be needed. But here’s the brutal truth: When you’re always available, people start assuming your time has no value. And if your time has no value, then guess what? Neither do you.
One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard from older generations is that younger workers are always on. My grandmother once told me, back when I was just starting my career, “Your generation doesn’t have office hours. We left work at work. Sure, we did the books on weekends sometimes, but we weren’t glued to our bosses’ every whim like a bunch of anxious Labrador retrievers.” (Okay, she didn’t say the last part, but you get the idea.)
Here’s the harsh reality: Being constantly available doesn’t make you indispensable—it makes you disposable. It tells the world that your time is cheap. That you don’t respect yourself enough to set boundaries. And when you don’t respect your own time, why should anyone else?
Worse yet, this “always-on” culture is frying our brains. Studies show burnout is at an all-time high, and no kidding—when your phone is buzzing with “urgent” demands at all hours, how could you not feel a constant state of overwhelm?
Even when you try to focus, the damage is done. You’re knee-deep in a project when—ding!—your coworker’s name flashes on your screen. You don’t answer, but now your brain is hijacked. What if it’s important? What if they think I’m not working? The distraction alone tanks your productivity.
And let’s not even get started on the expectation of instant replies to midnight emails or 6 AM Slack messages. This isn’t “hustle culture”—it’s a collective delusion that every notification is a five-alarm fire. So here’s the uncomfortable truth: If you don’t value your time, nobody else will either. And if you’re always on, you’re not a hero.
Need to focus? Clear the Mind.
Your brain is easily distracted, constantly overstimulated, and terrible at staying on task. Everytime it starts to chase another pointless thought, another notification, another, “I’ll just check real quick…” it burns through your mental energy like a trust fund kid in Vegas.
Turning off the phone helps. But that’s the easy part. The real challenge is stopping yourself from acting on every impulse the second it pops in your head. The brain is wired to chase novelty. That’s why you reflexively grab your phone when you’re bored. Why you tab over to The Artist Formerly Known as Twitter when work gets hard, or you why you suddenly remember twenty urgent things when you take a shower.
The solution? Veto power.
You have to learn to kill impulses before they become actions. And the best way to do that? Name them.
The more you understand how your brain tries to trick you, the easier it is to catch it in the act. Think of it like mental Jiu-Jitsu—you spot the distraction, label it (“Ah, there’s the ‘I should Google this random thought’ impulse again”), and then shut it down before it hijacks your attention.
This isn’t just some self-help fluff, by the way. It’s basically what meditation teaches you. In mindfulness, they call it “noting”—when your mind wanders, you acknowledge the distraction (“thinking”, “itching”, “wanting to check email like a dopamine junkie”), then gently return to your breath.
At work, it’s the same thing. Let’s say you’re grinding on a project with a tight deadline (or just trying to leave on time for once). The second you feel the pull to check your phone, or open Slack, or fall down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about 18th-century whaling practices—you note it, then get back to work.
The key? Do it fast. Do it early. Do it every single time.
Because distractions are like zombies—if you don’t kill them immediately, they multiply. And before you know it, your brain’s a wasteland of half-finished tasks and wasted hours. Your brain’s gonna fight you. It’s gonna whine. It’s gonna come up with very convincing reasons why you need to check Instagram right now.
Vetoing can also be scheduled. For example, a good trick that many professionals are utilizing more is the use of a timer. Set a timer for 25 minutes. For those 25 minutes, you do one thing and one thing only—say, blasting through emails. No checking Slack. No “quick” social media detours. Just emails. Then, you take a 5 minute break, and spend 25 minutes doing nothing but working on an important project.
The takeaway? Your brain is a needy, self-obsessed drama queen. And unless you learn to wrangle it, you’ll keep getting owned by your own thoughts