Page 5 - J2TEAM-Community-RescueTime-Focus-Guide

It’s the unpredictability that makes the party noise so hard to ignore.
And this is why we find unpredictable noises in the office so distracting,
as well. For instance, overhearing just one side of a conversation (a
colleague on a phone call, for example) is especially hard to tune out,
because it’s a human distraction that’s also unpredictable.

Studies have shown hearing just one side of a conversation is more
irritating than hearing two people have a discussion nearby, because
we can’t predict the flow of the conversation when we can only hear
one participant.

If you’re in an open office with dividers such as movable cubicle
walls, you may notice this effect is even worse. Despite the temporary
nature of cubicle dividers, they give us a false sense of privacy, which
tends to lead to louder conversations than we’d otherwise have in
an entirely open space, which makes those distractions all the more
difficult to ignore.

So what about paying attention among this sea of distraction? What
does that look like? And how can we get better at it?

Studies have explored what the brain does when we’re paying attention
to something particular amidst unrelated information. One study
showed participants a very quick series of images of faces and houses.
Participants were asked to focus on either the houses or the faces, and
ignore the other type of image.

The researchers found that when seeing an image in the group they
were paying attention to, the synapses in the participant’s brain would
fire in synchronicity, something like a choir all singing in unison. But
when seeing an image the participant was trying to ignore, the brain
would fire synapses out of sync.

Researchers posit this synchronicity makes the messages being shared
by those synapses easier to “hear”, as it helps them rise above the

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