Distractions in the workplace are inevitable, regardless of whether you’re at home, in the office, or in a coworking space. But the most obvious kinds of distractions — background noise, chatty colleagues, or a needy pet — are not as detrimental to productivity as you may think. For most knowledge workers, the chief culprit is our screens — and the technology that enables us to multitask, whether we’re intentionally doing so or not. 

Below, we take a deep dive into how multitasking is killing your productivity and how AI is here to help.

Why Multitasking is Killing Your Productivity

Many people attempt to multitask at work, believing that it makes them more efficient. It makes sense, after all, to wrap up an email or a PowerPoint slide during a meeting where you’re not expected to talk. 

However, research shows that switching back and forth between tasks significantly lowers efficiency and productivity — particularly when working on more complex projects. Toggling between tabs and tasks can cost up to five weeks’ worth of work per year. And this hampers our already-shoddy attention spans, which are continuously shrinking.

In 2004, researchers found that people focused on a single screen for an average of 150 seconds. That time has dropped to just 47 seconds in recent years. And when attention is diverted from an ongoing project, it takes about 25 minutes for a person to refocus on that task. This, of course, has ramifications on overall work quality. It also impacts a person’s ability to recall key details in both their professional and personal life.

So what can we do, aside from committing to an all-out digital detox? The solution might lie in altering our relationship with the technologies and apps that are programmed to help and distract us. Desktop notifications, for instance, have lasting effects on focus, long after a person has read and responded to a message. This may mean changing up an existing workflow (i.e. turning off notifications, blocking off time for responses) or integrating new workflow automation tools that leave room for focus.

How AI Tools Like VoiceHub Support Focused Work

Rev’s speech-to-text technology is a prime example of how AI can help you be efficient and stay focused during meetings and calls, whether with clients or colleagues.

Rev recently introduced VoiceHub — a cutting-edge AI productivity platform that transcribes, organizes, analyzes, and secures your conversations, making them searchable, shareable, and actionable across your organization.

By recording and summarizing discussions, VoiceHub lets you stay present and engaged during brainstorming sessions or casual catch-ups, freeing you from the distraction of taking notes,  juggling tabs, responding to chats, and checking emails. (And yes, everyone knows when you’re not paying attention!)

The Science Behind Attention and How AI Can Help

This doesn’t mean that workers should necessarily offload the bulk of their work to AI. Rather, strategic deployment is key — and can even help us sharpen our attention spans. According to Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics and author of Attention Span, AI can function akin to an assistant or a coach to support employees through their day-to-day tasks.

“AI can help us understand when our peak attention times are, when we need a break, or what’s the right task fit for the amount of attention we have,” Mark said on a podcast earlier this year with UX Magazine. In using AI tools to support our work processes and focus, we can better align our efforts with the demands of our tasks, optimizing productivity while acknowledging our diverse cognitive needs throughout the day.

In Attention Span, Mark counters the myth that “flow” is the ideal attentive state every person should strive for to work intensely and deeply: “Rather than trying to achieve flow, which is simply not realistic for the nature of most of our jobs, which require an analytical mindset, our goal instead should be to achieve a balance of different types of attentional states,” Mark writes. 

Perhaps time is no longer the best unit of measurement for productivity. Attention management might be a better way to gauge focus and cultivate it to work more effectively. This is where AI tools come in handy — by helping you recognize which brain state is best for the task at hand and giving you the helping hand to unlock that state. The hard work is shifting yourself into that mindset in order to get it done.