Life is complicated, at home and work, day in and day out. The complication has only been multiplied by the rapid infusion of technology in our lives. Despite streamlining and simplifying many things, technology creates an environment that can overwhelm us with an abundance of stimuli and a surfeit of information. So much so, that unless we manage our world well, our capacity to absorb that information is overwhelmed, and our attention span wanders.

It happens to all of us over and over again.  When working on completing a particular task, my mind wanders to other tasks, and then, wait – is that an alert I heard on my phone?  I check the message immediately, because I am helplessly predisposed to do so, and lo and behold I have another item requiring my immediate attention. I am off down that rabbit hole and have lost my focus once again.

In our biopharma work, not only does this plague us all in daily desk work, it burdens us at the enterprise level as well. In addition to technology-driven distractions, we have what I call “initiative overload”. In conjunction with a persistent influx of text messages, we have a steady stream of overarching stimuli: multiple concurrent corporate or department initiatives, each with a “high priority.”  How (and where) can we focus when:

• These initiatives are competing for the same resources and attention.
• These initiatives are additive, in that they are extra work on top of our daily jobs.
• These initiatives often have overlapping goals and targets but are not aligned, resulting in duplication of effort and/or conflicting methods and solutions.

In biopharma operations, it is common for well-intentioned people to be working very hard on any number of initiatives which end up taking longer than planned, uncover additional complexities, and/or exceed budget forecasts and expectations.  I attribute many of these stumbles to a lack of “allowed” focus, the word “allowed” being stressed.  It is not that we do not focus, but rather we are not allowed to contribute meaningfulfocus to a particular effort because we have too many other conflicting initiatives in which we are participating. We are constantly shifting our focus from what we were doing to the new “immediate” need and in the end, none of the initiatives get the full attention required to be successful.

I have tried to manage this condition in my personal life. I put my phone away at family dinners and during other conversations, so I can devote my full attention to those interactions in order to get the most out of them.  I turn off “push” notifications of the latest distressing news, and I try to evaluate competing priorities before agreeing to the next tempting activity. A consciousness of the practical limits of time and attention, and the confidence to challenge the expected and the politically correct, can bring order to the array of priorities. Putting some initiatives aside to focus on one (or fewer) at a time will likely mean a better, faster output of work, and bring forth the best ideas and effort.

When confronted with multiple initiatives, participation in all, and meaningful contribution to all, are inversely proportional to one another.  The more things you are doing at one time, the less well you are doing any one of them. Management has the responsibility of improving this focus problem, through clear leadership, triage, resource allocation and budgeting. But all of us need to be vigilant to create an environment capable of productive focus.

Steve Shevel

Senior Associate

© Waife & Associates, Inc., 2019