Managing Attention in an Office Environment Essay

Managing Attention in an Office Environment - Essay Example Sitting at a desk or in a cubicle all day doesn’t provide much stimulation, and minds will inevitably wander. The human desire for variety, fed by a diet of fast-cut films and 30-second commercials, inevitably leads employees away to something more engaging or entertaining than another spreadsheet, another email, other earnings report. This distraction, this need for stimulation and entertainment, is death to productivity, and thus to profitability.   It would be easy to say that one should simply install blocking software to keep social networking sites, game sites, media sites, political blogs, and so on. However, that â€Å"and so on† is murder. Either employee will find ways around the software or, if the software is good enough and the ban comprehensive enough, they will lose the ability to find needed information online. Even if a perfect distraction firewall existed, employees would still flick balls of paper at the ceiling to relieve boredom. If a ban on paper-flicking is introduced, a new distraction will be invented. The solution to the problem of distraction should not be playing Whack-A-Mole with the concept of boredom.   The most addictive video games work on the concept of a â€Å"dopamine drip,† a steady flow of feedback, of minor feelings of accomplishment and pleasure, that is doled out in response to the player’s actions. If a game were designed so that nothing the player did matter or changed anything in the game until the very end, nobody would want to play it. Even if they did, they would find more entertaining things to do while playing.   An employee who tosses crumpled pieces of paper across a corridor, trying to sink them into the wastebasket, isn’t having a wildly entertaining time. The game of it, however, is providing him that feedback. Every time he nails that wastebasket, he feels a sense of progress, of accomplishment.