Do distractions help you at work?

Even if only for two weeks, the United States caught World Cup fever. That’s no easy task for a country notorious for not necessarily disliking soccer but basically not even acknowledging its existence. (Be honest: How many MLS games have you ever watched in your life?) But thanks to nail-biting games and awesome performances by Landon Donovan, Americans got caught up in the excitement. Workers were streaming the game on their computers or running to the break room to check the score. Some even put the game on projection screens in meeting rooms. It suddenly became inescapable.

You probably know that the World Cup is the single most popular sporting event in the world, so even after the U.S. was eliminated, millions of people kept watching. An article from The Associated Press highlights how workplace productivity during the World Cup is a quadrennial battle for employers and employees.

From the article:

“One study suggests the German economy, Europe’s largest, loses more than $8 billion in productivity, about 0.27 percent of gross domestic product, during the monthlong tournament. Surveys in Britain predict output losses there of $1.5 billion to $2.3 billion.”

In some countries, watching the game at work is just a given, as the article points out. In other places, workers are warned not to let the fun of the game interfere with productivity.

However, if you couldn’t watch the game during work, you probably tried to find a way to get updates. Perhaps you just wore one earbud so you could hear the play-by-play (and drone of vuvuzelas). Or maybe you feverishly refreshed a blog that was giving live updates of the game. On the surface, doesn’t it seem as if we’re a culture of multitaskers who can handle following a game and doing other work? Maybe not. Perhaps we weren’t meant to split our minds between work and other distractions.

In the last few weeks, Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows: Has the Internet Rewired Your Brain?” has made headlines. In his book, Carr looks at the history of written language and how people have absorbed information. His concern is that the Internet has turned us into a culture of skimmers. If TV news made the sound bite omnipresent, then the Internet, he suggests, has made paragraph-length information the most we’re willing to process. This review from NPR highlights one important quote:

“Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators and Web designers point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.”

That’s not to say the Internet is a waste of time, but how we use it might be forcing us to think we can process more than one task at a time when really we’re just skimping on all of our responsibilities.

Take this conclusion from reviewer Oscar Villalon:

“With ‘The Shallows,’ Carr attempts to snap us out of the hypnotic pull of our iPhones, laptops and desktops. He reveals why we’re suddenly having a hard time focusing at length on any given thing, and why we compulsively check our e-mail accounts and Twitter feeds and never seem to be able to get our work done.”

The World Cup takes up four weeks of soccer fans’ attention. Recently, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s hearings were streamed online for anyone to watch. Opening day for your favorite baseball team happens each year. March Madness dominates workplaces each spring. E-mail, phone calls, instant messages, text messages — they’re not going anywhere. And we’re convinced we can handle all of them, but can we?

Do you think you or workers in general have mastered multitasking? Or have we just convinced ourselves that we have no choice but to multitask because of increased technology? Perhaps fear of losing our jobs during a struggling economy is our main motivation for spreading ourselves too thin.