Having issues focusing? You are not alone in this

Is it the pandemic? The plethora of Zoom meetings? The multitude of email accounts, each with its own cascade of insistent daily alerts?

I honestly can’t say what the reason is, but my concentration is shot. Before the pandemic, I would dream about spending entire days alone at the office. In that reverie, I’d write long articles, resolve complex management processes, catch up on professional classes …

Uh, yeah, that’s not the way it’s been going. Since the pandemic started, I’ve had more days alone at the office than I ever could have imagined. And how have I spent them? Not the way I just described.

Let’s see. On a typical day, I check email a bazillion times, start a writing project and save it for later, reopen writing projects I saved earlier and then re-save them for later, look in the fridge, check email again, read newspaper headlines … and then in the second hour, I do it all again.

I might be exaggerating, but not by much.

It doesn’t help that so many things that used to fit into my day naturally are now confusing or time-consuming. Take, for example, the simple process of calling to make a dentist appointment. Whoops — looks like that’s online now. Guess I’ll need to make an account. Oh, shoot, that password didn’t work. Let me try again …

As it turns out, I’ve learned that many of my clients are also in this situation. What’s interesting is that those who are unemployed seem just as prone to the flurry of attention-sapping activities as the folks who are working. What to do?

As a start, I’ve stopped blaming myself, choosing to see this as a “force of nature” kind of thing. My self-talk is much kinder. Join me in replacing phrases like “I messed that up” with “That didn’t go quite as well as it might have.”

Speaking of which, I received an interesting email on this point from a publicist who invited me to talk with Kimberly Nix Berens, an authority on instruction and attention span issues. I meant to call her before my deadline, but … well, that didn’t go quite as well as it might have.

Luckily, the publicist (Cassidy Ricalde) writes a mean press release, and encapsulated several engaging ideas from her client’s book, “Blind Spots: Why Students Fail and the Science that Can Save Them.”

Although it’s clear from the title that Berens is discussing issues that impact learning for students, the information shared on the press release creates interesting parallels to other walks of life. For example, it seems that diagnoses of attention deficit (ADHD) are currently growing faster among adults than among children.

Acknowledging that the distractions of remote work could be exacerbating attention issues, Berens approaches the “new normal” of a distracted mindset from a skills rather than a mental health approach. As noted in the press release, “People have a hard time focusing when they lack fluency on specific tasks, and attention issues are just a byproduct of a lack of mastery in a specific area.”

From my experience, that statement is an exact match for the situation many job seekers and career changers find themselves in. Not knowing where to start, not feeling adept at the process, not being sure what the steps might be — it’s a sure formula for “task switching.”

If you’ve been feeling this way about your career processes, I can offer a couple of ideas to help. First, make a plan. You might need to rely on a book or a career counselor, but it will help to have defined steps.

Next, break steps into the smallest parts, and focus on just one task at a time. “Explore career ideas” isn’t small enough, but “Read three articles about being an engineer” is. Finally, build in breaks so you can synthesize what you’re learning from each task.

For my part, I don’t know if my attention span issues are situational or if they’re becoming a permanent part of my personality. But it’s refreshing to see Berens tackling the issue like a problem that can be solved, rather than a pathology to be lived with. I feel more focused already.