Imagine. It's World War I. You are an officer in the British Army; not a cushy, General Sir Hogmanay Melchett in Blackadder sort of officer. No Sah. You are in the trenches with your men, just another fellow in the 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers, although you do have a bit of a propensity for danger missions into no man's land.

Now you are sitting there in the trenches on the front in Ploegsteert, Belgium. Unlike most of the waterlogged, rat-infested bogholes that make up the front line, the 6th's trenches have a remarkable lack of one thing. Lice. That's because you are Lieutenant Colonel Churchill, later Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, and the first thing you did as commander of the battalion was recognise the need to de-louse your men so they aren't distracted from the task at hand.

The ability to focus on what really matters, and to do it quickly and confidently, is seen as one of most essential attributes for success in the modern business arena. But this tells only half the story. What matters more is our ability to ignore the multitude of distractions that work to pull us away from the task at hand. As Sir Winston said, ‘You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks’.

We need to be able not only to focus, but to fix that focus and narrow it to an attention span that remains constant and unwavering.

Our ability to pay attention is a survival tool that the brain developed as a means of keeping us safe, fed and sheltered. Without attention, we cannot learn. If we do not learn, we do not encode memory. If we lack memory, we have nothing to add to our life store of experience. What we have experience in influences what we direct our attention to and make a success of, and therefore earn a living at, which takes us back to being safe, fed and sheltered.

Bottom line: Attention matters for performance.

Fragmented focus

Our ability to pay attention is highly complex and fragile. Think about what happens when you sit down at your desk. You start work diligently enough, but within five minutes distraction sets in, because someone sends you something interesting via LinkedIn, or you notice a message from a friend in your inbox, or you decide to sneak a look at the latest issue of Gourmet Traveller on your iPad.

We have the ability to find information to complete a task with the click of a web tab, but the challenge most of us face every day is not how focused we are but how very easily we are distracted.

It has been argued that our attention span is shrinking rapidly as a consequence of our inability to manage our distractions; and that our technology is designed to add to this, rather than aid our focus. This is of major concern for these main reasons:

• We think in sound bites without developing the full story.
• We surface-skim information and as a result fail to develop a deeper understanding of what we actually need to know.
• Fragmenting our time and our attention makes us less efficient.
• Distractions put us at risk of making more mistakes or of accidents, particularly in the workplace or on the way to and from the workplace.
• Relationships, both personal and professional, are damaged through insufficient attention.

Developing our intelligence around how we pay attention to our tasks and to others is key to allowing us to:

• maintain our cognitive energy across our day
• learn effectively
• form memory and develop new skills
• recall information at the appropriate time
• reduce errors and stay safe
• maintain relationships.

Give your brain a break

Despite our best intentions in terms of our attitude and theoretical desire to focus, distraction will occur. For example, how well can you concentrate when you are hungry, tired, sleep deprived, too cold or hot, feeling unwell, on medication (especially those that helpfully warn they may cause drowsiness), in a noisy environment, being distracted or procrastinating?

Busy days and long hours take their toll on our thinking and performance.

Creating a healthy brain by integrating the healthy lifestyle choices described in the earlier keys will help provide us with the mental energy we need to get through our day. Tony Schwartz, CEO of the Energy Project, recommends we act as our own chief energy officer to monitor when we need a ‘rest and refuel’ stop.

Whatever our work practice or schedule, our brain is designed to work in roughly the same way: in chunks of time following the natural flow of peaks and troughs of our energy. This is known as our ultradian rhythm (see figure 5.2, overleaf). Discovered by Nathan Kleitman, this 90-minute cycle of energy takes us through different levels of alertness; remember that alertness is one of the key networks for attention. By choosing to work in sync with this natural flow of energy we can increase our productivity and efficiency by limiting our periods of focus.

Working to a deadline within this framework can also give us that extra oomph to focus our attention and complete a focused task, because we have the welcome reward of a break, such as a nice cup of tea, to look forward to.

It's like interval training in exercise. Running for 20 kilometres can be a slog. Running for four kilometres then taking a break before continuing will get you to the same destination, but feeling less tired overall. Well, that's the theory!

When my husband and I climbed Mt Kinabalu, the second day of the climb started around 3 am so we could reach the summit before sunrise. We were very excited and keen to get going, but our guide, who was very wise, advised us to ‘tread slowly, tread slowly’. He made us stop frequently to catch our breath. And he was right. We passed a number of other people determined to be first to the summit, but by starting too fast and going for too long in the high altitude, they ran out of energy. Slow and steady with plenty of breaks got us to our destination in time to witness the splendid sight of the first rays of sunlight kissing the tops of the adjacent mountains.

The same principle applied when I was working in my medical practice. Most days were big days so I would try to pace myself, a bit like a jogger in a long-distance run. By starting off at slightly lower than full capacity, it was easier to get through the busy morning surgery and last to a late lunch. Following a quick pit stop, and aware that my energy levels for the afternoon session had already dropped, I would try to pace myself a bit further. Four o'clock is my lowest energy point for the day. If I don't get a cup of tea and a five-minute break around that time, my level of focus and mental efficiency rapidly drops off. The problem was, of course, that additional, emergency appointments were often squeezed in towards the end of the day. The result? The sickest patients were attended to by a tired doctor who was not necessarily at her cognitive freshest or best.

Pacing your day in chunks of focused thinking time, interspersed with ‘brain out’ breaks, means your brain can operate more efficiently. You remain more alert and attentive, which means fewer mistakes and a chance to finish on time.

Many workplaces have now become completely immersed in the cultural expectation of continual performance that seemed to rise to prevalence in the late eighties. Now that we are aware that this actually drives performance down, how can you manage your cognitive energy to work with your brain's natural energy cycle within this environment?

Does your workplace value longer working hours in the mistaken belief that this leads to increased productivity?

Is overtime expected as a means to keep up with the amount of work that has to be done?

Staying late to finish an important task will occasionally be necessary, but simply working longer because your boss expects you to demonstrate your commitment has been shown to be counterproductive, as we simply expand our work to fit the greater time available. It was Bob Pozen, author of Extreme Productivity, who said, ‘Time becomes an easy metric to measure how productive someone is, even though it doesn't have any necessary connection to what they achieve’.

You don't pay attention to me anymore

‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’

Simone Weil

We're not very generous with our attention anymore, and when we receive it we rarely recognise what a gift we are given: it allows us to connect at a far deeper level; it builds trust, relatedness and understanding.

Can you remember the last conversation you had where the other person gave you their complete and undivided attention? How did it make you feel?

Active listening is a leadership skill that can dramatically improve interpersonal relationships. Too often we spend our conversations playing ping-pong in our own heads, composing our response before we've given the other person a chance to finish. Leaders who listen more and speak less are more effective communicators. It is the clarity of message that matters, and that comes from fully assimilating all the information provided.

In negotiations and dispute resolution, ensuring that each side is fully heard allows progress to be made more quickly and means both sides are more likely to consider a compromise. It puts the brain in a more relaxed state, reducing the emotional component of the discussion, and keeps the thinking part of our brain (the prefrontal cortex) more accessible.

Our current mental disposition has been described as a state of continuous partial attention. This keeps the brain in a state of high alert, which is not only exhausting but restricts our ability to stay on task and relate with others. In his book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, Daniel Goleman describes how this continuous partial attention is diminishing our ability to form rapport or to engage at a deeper level, because this requires a shared focus between two people.

Perhaps you have noticed how hard it is to hold on to the thread of a conversation if you're busy sorting out paperwork, attending to an urgent email and checking your diary for your next appointment — all at the same time.

In a 2005 paper for Harvard Business Review, ‘Overloaded circuits: why smart people underperform’, psychiatrist Ned Hallowell revealed a new phenomenon, a psychological condition he was seeing with increasing frequency. This condition was causing those affected to lose their sense of perspective, to suffer a high level of distractibility and a variety of psychosomatic complaints such as fatigue, insomnia, mental stress, anxiety, panic and guilt. For many people the condition he called Attention Deficit Trait (ADT) has become the ‘norm’.

This condition was noted to be remarkably similar to Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), which affects between 4 and 5 per cent of adults. If you recognise these tendencies in yourself (or perhaps your partner), remember that your inability to function with clarity and focus could be explained by ADT rather than ADD.

It's important to differentiate between the two. The main difference is that ADT is purely the result of the environment we create and live in. As our lives have become increasingly complex and our work more demanding, our brain sometimes responds by going into survival mode — and that means our thinking capacity shrinks.

CEOs and managers, being high achievers, are especially at risk. Being good at focusing, prioritising and managing challenges, they will often have worked out a series of strategies to deal with their workload; except, as the hamster wheel of work spins ever faster, the time spent trying not to fall off increases. As fatigue kicks in, our ability to stay focused on the bigger picture is reduced and we start behaving in a reactive way, putting out continual spot fires, which only exacerbates the situation.

Managing ADT starts with understanding how the brain responds to stress and how our high levels of distractibility reduce our ability to manage our fragmented attention. Then it's about putting in place a program to create the ideal work environment in which the brain feels safe and can perform at its very best.

CEOs have shared with me a number of strategies that they have found helpful.

So what are we doing when we distract ourselves?

We are either planning our future or ruminating about our past, which doesn't leave much time to get on with the task in front of us right now. This is now such a major problem for high-performance thinkers that the next chapter is devoted to how to get our brain to stay in the here and now.

Rage against the machines?

Is our modern technology really bad for our brains?

It would seem that in relation to our ability to pay attention the answer is yes. While few would prefer to go back to a world before mobile phones or the interwebs, we have paid for these modern conveniences with a vastly reduced attention span, and this is changing our brain.

Daniel Levitin, author of The Organised Mind, compares our smartphones to the Swiss army knives beloved by previous generations of young boys. Our phones are not ‘phones’. They are powerful processors that allow us to send texts, check our email, take photographs, play games and update our social media. We make restaurant bookings; buy clothes; book airline tickets, hotels and cruises; update our diary; have face-to-face business meetings; find the nearest bottle shop; do our grocery shopping; and make doctor's appointments.

Sometimes we even make a phone call.

Their portability and ease of use have made smartphones a worldwide phenomenon. They have now overtaken desktop computers as our first form of new technology (54 per cent to 46 per cent). The level of connectivity and accessibility they provide has contributed to our rapid globalisation.

The dark side of all this is the level of distractibility and addictive potential that is seemingly built into every app. We use these tools to pack every waking moment. While commuting to and from work we play music or games or check our phone messages. On buses, trams, trains and pavements the parade of the ‘heads down tribe’, as they have become known in China, now dominates our social settings. People are in essence spending time together but are no longer communicating in person, except via text or tweet.

Some scientists, such as Barbara Fredrickson, are concerned that our passion for social media is compromising our biological ability to connect with other people. Digital natives interact via arcane redacted text language instead of face-to-face conversations in real time. Many are finding it hard to cope with ‘personal’ conversations or when they have to confront someone with a work issue or discuss problems — or, even harder, real emotions. This loss of resilience and coping skills is manifesting in increasing levels of anxiety, especially in the under-25 age group. This impacts social cohesiveness and therefore commercial collaborative ability and engagement.

Sheri Turkle, author of Together Alone, says unless we can learn to be alone with our imagination, we will only ever know how to be lonely. Maggie Jackson, in her book Distracted, takes this one step further, believing that the way we are living our lives is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention.

The implication is that technology breaks can make the difference to improving our physical and emotional wellbeing. But for the love of Steve Jobs, don't go cold turkey! Try an hour phone-free, then increase it slowly. Make sure if you are with a partner or friend they do the same.

Why monotasking is the new black

Multitasking, the myth beloved of parents everywhere that we can focus our attention on more than one task at a time, is a physiological impossibility, unless you happen to be in the 1 to 2 per cent (according to research by Watson and Strayer) of the population who are supertaskers and use a different part of their brain to divide attention. Until we have learned how we can do this for ourselves, the advice remains the same.

We are not Superman or Wonder Woman, and even if we put our underpants on over our clothes, we cannot fly. Not even in an invisible jet.

As figure 5.3 shows, the problem with multitasking is that we are asking our brain to do something it wasn't designed for.

We use our prefrontal cortex to focus attention. It is an extremely energy-hungry part of the brain and a confined space. While the received wisdom has been that we can hold up to seven (plus or minus two) items in the front of mind at any one time, this has been shown to be the case only for simple digits. More complex items take up more thinking room, meaning we can probably hold onto only one or two ideas at any one time. Increasing focus to give an item our full attention limits the space to one.

When we attempt to multitask, our obliging brain helps by splitting the two items and allocating one to each hemisphere. Don't even think of going for three, because if you remember the definition of hemi, there's a ‘half’ in it, and this isn't a lesson in non-Euclidean geometry.

Our hemispheres take the two items and alternate our attention between them extremely quickly. This gives us the magical illusion that we are multitasking, when in fact we are just giving half our attention to each task, and probably messing each of them up quite effectively and thoroughly. In fact, studies by Rubinstein and others have revealed ‘multitasking’ can reduce performance and productivity by 40 per cent.

It is cognitively exhausting, reduces memory and is associated with an increased amount of error.

Strategies for focus

Want to be a high-performance thinker? Here's the secret: monotasking.

This is a bit complex, so I'll try to make it as user-friendly as possible. It's sometimes hard to take the jargon out of medical explanations, I admit, but here goes.

Well, that went better than I thought it would.

Regaining our attention and managing distractions is possible because we can exercise our attention just like a muscle. The more we practise, the better we get and sometimes just a few simple changes in our work practices can make a big difference.

Working smarter begins with choosing where to place your focus and creating the environment that best suits your attention-on brain. Here are 10 leads on how best to create that environment.

• Pick a quiet place to allow your brain to think in a less stressed state. Studies by Evans and Johnson have shown that noise is a stress and distraction that diminishes our ability to focus. Many people will tell you they can only work while listening to music. They have trained their brain to tolerate the sound, but the brain is still stressed and does not habituate to noise. If you must have sound, make it music that you like but are not actively engaged with. Why? Because, paradoxically, music or other noise can be used as a focusing tool to block out other distractors. That's why some people can work well in coffee shops: they have become acclimatised to the cacophony of extraneous noise to the extent they no longer consciously hear it (though the subconscious does).
• Practise your focus, just as you would during a music lesson. Set aside 10 minutes to pay close attention to a task you do regularly. It could be reading, listening to music or preparing a meal. As you do the task consciously, think about what you are doing, and then test yourself on something you have learned.
• Prioritise the following day's work. By sorting out the next day's top priorities before the end of your day, your mind is already focusing on the things to be done, even before you have arrived and started working on them.
• Fight for three. Peter Cook, thought leader and author of The New Rules of Management, shares the wise advice that you fight to get your top three priorities done every day. Having identified what they are, choose to focus and work only on these until they are completed. This builds on Bob Pozen's suggestion that we allocate 70 to 80 per cent of our working day to our top three priorities.
• Manage your inbox. Bob Pozen's advice is to respond immediately to email that merits it and junk the rest. He firmly believes in the OHIO principle: ‘Only Handle It Once’.
• Schedule meetings for B- or C-class thinking time. Our best thinking times are brief. In other words, we have to treat our thinking time as an investment in quality, like really good wine or, with apologies to vegetarian readers, like the best quality Wagyu beef. You want to enjoy it at its best. Those lesser cuts of sirloin, gravy beef and mince correspond to the other times when perhaps we don't require quality thinking time. If you do your best creative work in the morning, schedule appointments and meetings for the afternoon. As a rule, your best thinking time in any 24-hour period is most likely to be in the morning, usually the first three to four hours after getting up. That's why developing the habit of getting a few items done quickly BEFORE you start your working day is a brilliant way to prime yourself for continuing great performance.
• Unplug regularly. As already mentioned, this means taking regular brain breaks, the pit stops necessary to fuel up for another lap of grand prix business performance. Don't neglect regular technology breaks either. In a study by Gloria Mark (from the University of California) and others in which office workers were denied access to their computers and smartphones for five days, it was found that while they complained bitterly at first, they then showed increased productivity. What's more, individual blood-pressure readings went down and they subjectively reported feeling better and less stressed.
• Play some video games. Yes, video games, especially those fast, action-packed games (not necessarily Grand Theft Auto 5), are great for building attention. Daphne Bavalier, a neuroscientist, has shown how video games make our brain smarter, better, faster and stronger. The average gamer is in their thirties, so these games are clearly not just for the kids. While it is recognised that overplaying certain video games can lead to problems with addictive behaviour, for the vast majority, playing games for an hour or so several nights a week has a number of positives.

  Gamers develop sharper visual acuity, which can help them pick out a stranger in a crowd and observe small details. They are also better at tracking more objects simultaneously. Games boost our attentional networks (alerting, orienting and executive), driving — you guessed it — plasticity. Gamers are also better at task switching with less cognitive cost compared with non-gamers.

  Training on action games can help people improve their performance in difficult mental tasks, and this improvement persists for months after the training has finished.

• Take regular holidays. Take a real vacation, without your laptop, computer tablet or smartphone, and rediscover the joys of conversation, of seeing the beauty of the world around you, and fully engage all your senses in your experience.
• Avoid ‘multitasking’, or mythitasking. Yes, we know this is a no-brainer yet we all try to do it. Why? Because we think we can — we may even think we're good at it — and we believe it saves us time and energy. It's such a pity this is wrong at all levels.