The rise of digital technology confronts us with an incessant flow of information and our brain places obstacles in our way, causing a decrease in efficiency at work. Focus on the 3 main illusions.
Have you ever felt exhausted after a day at work? Or do you sometimes find it difficult to focus when faced with demands? Or that you lack efficiency at work?
With the rise of digital technology, work has entered a new revolution: we are now facing an endless flow of information. However, our brain has not changed, and work is sometimes out of sync with its functioning and some of our automatic mechanisms.
It is possible to learn how to improve our efficiency and quality of life at work by bypassing certain obstacles that our brain places in our way!
Belief 1: doing several things at the same time saves us time
Our attention is very limited, and yet our brains often give us the illusion of seeing everything that is happening in front of our eyes. However, in reality, we can only become aware of a very small amount of information at a time. For example, in a meeting, if you decide to read an email when someone is explaining something important, your attention goes back and forth quickly between the content of the email and the intervention. This “multi-tasking” is indeed an illusion since our brain cannot effectively do two such complex things at the same time. As a result, you will take longer to respond to the email, risk making more mistakes, missing important information from the email or the intervention, and will be less invested in the meeting even though your participation is required. Our brain is playing a very bad trick here by making us believe that we are saving time by doing things in parallel rather than one after the other.
Belief #2: Taking breaks is wasting time
If sleepiness has particular signs such as yawning and heavy eyelids, making it clear to us that we need to sleep, The phenomenon of “mental fatigue” has, for its part, much more subtle signs that are therefore difficult to take into account. And yet the consequences of the accumulation of mental fatigue are numerous: impulsiveness, deterioration of mood and performance, increased risk of error and accident. This illusion of maintaining our capacities is therefore an obstacle to the implementation of the only effective prevention: the break, that is to say completely changing the nature of the activity in progress to restore cognitive abilities.
Belief #3: It's better to react to requests as they go rather than let them build up
At work, we tend to take digital requests into account immediately and continuously, even though some are designed to be processed asynchronously. This culture of urgency is found in many organizations, we sometimes suffer from it, but often contribute to it. Our brain is indeed very keen on new things, and digital notifications, announcing emails or messages, activate the “reward circuit”, which is also involved in the phenomenon of addiction. It's easier to tell what's really needed for our work from a bad habit that our brain is struggling to get rid of!
Especially since during a working day, we receive dozens of email notifications and messages that we become aware of in a few seconds... On average, it takes about 3 minutes to return to our initial task following an interruption. We then understand why we sometimes feel exhausted at the end of the day and frustrated in our goals!
Learning to regulate our connection practices, by bypassing our brain's automatic mechanisms, allows us to protect our efficiency but also our well-being at work!
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