5 Ways the Office Can Help us Reclaim Our Focus

As more and more of us multi-task and multi-screen our way through the day. It can be all too easy to have our focus diverted from the matter at hand, especially when working from home. In practice, our environment – specifically a collaborative workspace – may hold the key to reclaiming our focus.

What happened to our focus?

From the social media platforms that are engineered to lock us in an endless scroll to the push notifications that tear us away from productive activities, there are more distractions vying for our attention than ever before.

This phenomenon has been widely discussed, from responsible tech evangelists such as ex-Google employee James Williams to journalists like Johann Hari, who’s new book Stolen Focus has itself stolen headlines. While some of this commentary falls into platitudes, oversimplifications, and misplaced analysis of goldfishes’ attention spans, it is undeniable that the use of multiple smart devices during the workday – often simultaneously – can hamper productivity.

The act of switching tasks to check your phone or reply to an email might seem minor, but it comes at a cost. The American Psychology Association found that juggling tasks could cost as much as 40% of someone’s productive time, when you factor in the mental blocks that switching produces.

Our gradual return to offices is an opportunity to break from the bad habits we may have formed over periods of lockdown. Working in the office full-time or on a more flexible model may be just what we need to build back the focus that has been sapped away over the long months of working from home.

It’s easy to get into the mindset that more screens mean more productivity – but that simply isn’t the case.

The 5 ways we can reclaim our focus

1. Meet face to face

You wouldn’t pull out your phone halfway through a work-related conversation, but many of us effectively do that multiple times a day while remote working. Zoom fatigue sets in and your attention wanes – you reach for your smartphone, or else switch tabs to something more engaging. Over the pandemic, WeWork found that this had a concrete impact on collaboration, diminishing employees’ ability to meet and brainstorm by 11% on average.

The solution, where safe to do so, is to meet with colleagues in person. Face-to-face interactions foster collaboration, both during planned meetings and spontaneous interactions. A Stanford study found that people who have this experience of working together persist longer on challenging tasks and perform better – in other words, their ability to focus improves.

2. Build connections

Beyond meeting spaces, the potential for offices to foster workplace friendships is undeniable. There’s nothing quite like grabbing a cup of coffee or lunch to catalyse new connections.

These friendships play a vital role in our working life. According to Harvard Business Review, they are proven to reduce rates of burnout and fatigue, which are tied to feelings of isolation. Sleep deprivation and other symptoms of burnout can make it harder to focus on complex tasks, especially when we start succumbing to microsleeps that momentarily sap our attention.

By maintaining connections with colleagues within the workplace and ensuring healthy work-life balance, we can combat the adverse effects of isolation.

3. Find your flow

One of the key findings of Johann Hari’s new book Stolen Focus was the role of flow states in enabling us to pay attention to a single task for a long period of time. Johann found that kind of concentration is generally directed towards something with a clear goal that we find engaging, whether that’s writing an article or scaling a rockface.

Leading psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described these flow states as occurring when we are pushed to our limits, physically or mentally – and either way we need room to push ourselves. An appreciation of flow states can be incorporated into the design of offices, with the right balance of open spaces for collaboration and smaller hubs for solitary flow-oriented work.

4. Create boundaries

One of the most difficult parts of working from home during the pandemic has been the difficulty to maintain boundaries between work and our lives outside of it. Some people even had to work from their bedroom, which sets a dangerous precedent for work spilling over into rest time. It is no surprise that 4 in 5 workers find it hard to “shut off” in the evening, which in turn will negatively impact their focus and mental wellbeing.

The office, in contrast, creates a natural boundary between work and home life. You go to work in the morning and, with any luck, return home once your work is finished. This ability to set boundaries is likely to be the reason our LinkedIn poll on the future of the office found that just 8% of employees want to work from home full time.

5. Get out of the house

Along the same lines, travelling into the office has a crucial advantage – it gets us moving and out of the house. As we all know, it can be easy to get stuck in a rut when working from home, falling into patterns of switching that chip away at our focus.

There are particular benefits of getting up and active too, especially if some of your journey is made on foot – walking has been found to boost creative thinking by 60%. There are also opportunities for offices to offer outdoor spaces for employees to exercise: for example, property developer Derwent London added a running track around the perimeter of the 16th floor of the White Collar Factory, home of Adobe’s London offices.

To regain focus we need to get outside, seek out challenges, and connect with one another.

If you associate working from the office with a lack of focus, it may be that you’re in the wrong office. In that case, there’s never been a better time to start the search for something better.