I have a three-pronged proposal for organizations in 2020. None of these would normally appear on corporate annual plans because the items will seem small potatoes and tangential. Still, companies should consider:Confronting the crisis of attention in our midst, and assist employees to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time, again improving productivity.
That doesn’t compare to launching a new product, revitalizing your branding, or gobbling up another company to goose the stock price. But the ideas are important. They are also urgent. And they are down-to-earth. Our shrinking attention span is urgent and important but ironically not as new as we believe. In 2004, Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, found that knowledge workers average about three minutes on a task before switching – two minutes when using an electronic tool. Our work divides on average into 10 different working spheres and we spend about 12 minutes in a sphere before switching to another.