Stephen H Baum Leadership

A growing number of my leadership clients struggle to focus on their daily agenda in the face of distractions. Email, texts, phones and walk-ins too often drive their attention from where it is really needed (according to them!).

I’ve already posted about two terrific articles that show that we lose will power after a series of challenging choices and decisions. One is by On Amir in Scientific American.

Brains Get Tired

The other is by John Tierney in the NY Times and presents actual court cases in which judges lost their judgment:

Decision Fatigue Impairs Judgement

So it is dangerous to let key decisions  be driven to later in the day by interruptions. And dangerous to take no breaks from mental challenges during the day.

Jonah Lehrer (“How We Decide”) writes wonderfully about topics on which leaders should percolate (e.g., behaviors under stress, when to use intuition)

In his latest post, he adds a dimension that makes me think:.

Jonah Lehrer on Focus In the Face of Handheld Distractions

Lehrer argues we should reduce rote learning and increase mastery of “executive control” in early education. Executive control describes the ability to use a part of the brain that keeps you focused and walls out distraction. My 3 year old granddaughter is being taught “focus” by her mother to supplement her already phenomenal memory of people and facts and her critical thinking.

But what, I wonder, can someone decades older do to take their executive control up a notch? I don’t have enough answers, but my experience suggests that it is a matter of “field experiments.” Try one technique after another in real life until you discover a couple that work for you.

In a future post, I will write about actual clients struggling with this and perhaps publish a list of more than a dozen techniques we are testing.

That’s my view. What’s Yours?