Responding to WhatsApp messages, checking emails, answering calls, attending meetings, and still delivering strategic tasks. For many professionals, this is the reality of every day. The problem is that, despite the intense pace, real productivity doesn’t seem to match the volume of effort.
“We live in a state of permanent distraction. Technology has brought speed, but also brutal competition for our attention“, says Virgilio Marques dos Santos, co-founder of FM2S Educação e Consultoria, a career management expert and PhD from Unicamp.
According to him, the feeling of exhaustion at the end of the workday, even without major deliverables, is a clear symptom of the impact of frequent interruptions at work. “Every time we are interrupted, our brain needs to make an extra effort to resume reasoning. This cycle of interruption and resumption consumes cognitive energy and impairs decision-making,” he explains.
This effect is not new. Classic studies on information overload, such as the one published in 2007 by Cheri Speier, Joseph Valacich, and Iris Vessey, in Decision Sciences, already showed that frequent distractions reduce mental clarity and increase the incidence of errors. The difference is that, with today’s hyperconnectivity, the scenario has worsened — and the cost has started to be measured in mental health as well.
The impact of distractions on the corporate daily life
In the workplace, distractions are often normalized. Successive meetings, instant messages, constant notifications, and “quick” interruptions from colleagues pile up and create noise that sabotages concentration. “When this becomes routine, important decisions start being made based on incomplete information or without proper reasoning. And this can directly affect the results of a project or an entire area“, says Santos.
He recalls that the multitasking professional, once celebrated, is now viewed with more caution. “Being productive isn’t about doing many things at once, but about making progress on the tasks that truly matter, with depth and full attention.”
Four strategies to protect focus and improve performance
Given this scenario, Santos lists four simple practices that can help reduce the impact of interruptions and increase work effectiveness:
1. Focused time blocks: set aside periods of the day for strategic tasks, with notifications turned off and interruptions minimized. Inform the team about this routine to align expectations;
2. Priority management: use tools like the Eisenhower Matrix (which divides tasks into four categories: urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important) to differentiate what is urgent from what is important. This avoids the risk of spending energy on low-impact demands;
3. Scheduled communication times: concentrate checking messages and emails at specific times of the day. This reduces the anxiety of always being available and improves time management;
4. Culture of respecting time: encourage clear and planned communication within the team. Many questions can be resolved in pre-scheduled meetings or with more objective message exchanges.
“Regaining focus is more than a matter of efficiency. It’s a way to take care of our mental health and the quality of the decisions we make every day,” concludes the expert.
