Increasing Focus and Productivity

The Science of Focus

A 2010 study conducted by Killingsworth et al, at Harvard University concluded that the average person’s mind wanders 47% of the time.  In addition they also found that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.  Respondents were increasingly unhappy as their minds wandered away from a present-moment experience.  Finally, the Mindfulness Institute asked industry leaders about their ability to remain focused in meetings and over 70% said they had difficulty.

Translated into dollars mind wandering is costly. A person whose salary is $50,000 per year wastes $20,000 in lost productivity.  Check out the ROI of rolling out your own Mindfulness strategy if only to teach your employees how to become more focused on the task at hand.

What can we do?

In today’s world, distraction is everywhere and our employees and leaders are not immune.  Our always-connected mobile devices are compelling us to check emails, message each other, post updates etc., perpetually shifting our attention away from what is in front of us – our work!  We see this all the time.  Watch people walk down a street these days and increasingly, you will see them glued to their devices, not paying attention to what is going on around them.  This is only getting worse and not better.  GREAT NEWS is that we can do something about it.

Developing a Mindfulness culture in the workplace and teaching employees HOW to better maintain their focus and attention by a modest 10% can save a company thousands of dollars per year.

Practice Improves Focus

There are many studies that demonstrate that Mindfulness meditation exercises can improve our ability to focus and reduce mind wandering.  Sustained focus is concentration.  Judson Brewer and colleagues studied the Default Mode Network of our brain.  This is a network of regions engaged every time we “do nothing”.  It’s the network responsible for self-referential thinking and mind wandering.  Researchers studied novice and experienced meditators and compared the activity of this region while meditating.  They found that experienced meditators had less activity in this network, which seems to indicate an increased ability to prevent their minds from wandering.  Brewer and his colleagues also studied the connectivity pathways between the executive centers of the brain (the pre-frontal cortex), which is responsible for our cognitive functioning and the emotional centers (limbic system and amygdala) and they found that there was increased connectivity in the experienced meditators.  This seems to indicate an increased ability to regulate one’s own emotions through cognition.

Both findings together indicate that with Mindfulness meditation training, we can learn and train the brain to maintain focus/concentration in our everyday lives and when we are in a potentially distracting emotional state of mind.

Our 4Steps™ approach will train you so you can develop this skill.