Diversity Woman Magazine

FALL 2015

Leadership and Executive Development for women of all races, cultures and backgrounds

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DW Life > d i v e r s i t y w o m a n . c o m Fa l l 2 0 1 5 D I V E R S I T Y W O M A N 47 "You can't abstain from eating or you will starve. But just as you need to learn to moderate your intake of food or you'll become obese, so you need to learn to moderate your use of electronics or you'll become superfcial." Smartphones that give us round- the-clock access to the Internet have exacerbated the problem. Te Cen- ter for Creative Leadership found in a 2012 study that professionals who use smartphones are connected to e-mail an average of 13.5 hours every day. Other research has shown that 50 percent of smartphone users check their phones before getting out of bed in the morn- ing, and 38 percent check for messages during dinner. Screen sucking One of the most common and harm- ful Internet behaviors is what Hallow- ell calls "screen sucking," an activity he says people engage in for up to 30 minutes out of every hour. " You're not productively online but absentminded- ly online," he says. " You're sending and receiving unimportant emails, surfing the Net, visiting favorite sites. You can give yourself the illusion you are work- ing but you're not. It's the plague of most workplaces." One CEO whom Hallowell worked with compared having her laptop on her desk to having a jar of M&M;'s. "She reached for it whenever she felt the least bit bored or frustrated. She was spend- ing an inordinate amount of time screen sucking," he says. Her solution to the problem was simple yet efective. "She took her computer and put it on a table behind her, so she didn't have to get up to access it—she just had to swivel in her chair. But that second it took to swivel gave her enough time to recon- sider the impulse." Even when you're determined to stay on task, the Internet has a way of in- serting itself. Your phone buzzes, your laptop chimes as a new e-mail arrives, or you receive a notifcation that a friend has tagged you in a picture on Facebook. Researchers have found that the typi- cal ofce worker is interrupted or self- interrupts every three minutes. Once that happens, it can take more than 20 minutes to get back on track. Mary Czerwinski, a research manager and principal researcher at Microsoft Research who studies human-computer interaction among the company's em- ployees, says that interruptions can be especially disruptive when people are engaged in the kind of challenging work that requires sustained focus. "Tat's something we observed in particular with programmers," she says. "Some- body would walk into his ofce to ask a question, and if the programmer was focused and working really hard, it to- tally threw him of. He started surfng the web and reading email, and it took a long time to get back on track." Buried under e-mail E-mail is one of the biggest interrupters. A 2012 study by the McKinsey Global Institute found that the average worker spent 28 percent of the workweek read- ing and responding to e-mails and that workers checked e-mail an average of 74 times day, according to Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the Univer- sity of California, Irvine. Houston compares that behavior to playing a slot machine at a casino. "It's a repetitive action that every so often gives you a reward," she says. "And so you keep checking and checking, and every once in a while, you get great news. Te random- reward aspect of it is addictive." THINKSTOCKPHOTOS One of the most common and harmful Internet behaviors is "screen sucking," an activity people engage in for up to 30 minutes out of every hour.

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