Losing focus at work is eas — Hey! Check this out ...

By Dana Knight
Indianapolis Star

I was just about to get down to the nitty-gritty of writing when an evil little temporary tattoo I got in the mail peeked from beneath my towering stack of files.

Wonder what that would look like on my ankle?

I rushed to the restroom. One damp cloth and 30-second rub later, the funky, mustard-colored sun tattoo looked pretty darned good.

The work I was trying to do at my desk? Not so good.

But I'm back, settled down in my chair with the Diet Pepsi I picked up on the way back from the tattoo task and ready to admit: ADD is a problem for me.

ADD as in Always Doubly Distracted at work. By e-mails, phone calls, life. By the boss, the touch-ups to makeup, the alluring infohole called the Internet. Sometimes I feel like staying focused on one task is impossible.

My American co-workers are with me on this one, according to a recent Harvard University study.

The average employee's attention span is, at most, 12 minutes. The average worker switches to a different task every three minutes and gets interrupted every two minutes, says Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California-Irvine who studies the effects of multitasking on workers. She reported her findings to Ergonomics Today.

With technology overload (experts estimate workers respond to at least 200 e-mails daily) and the multitasking culture, employees' brains are about to fizzle out.

It's a problem, a big one for employers, who lose valuable hours in productivity and attention to detail, as well as other distraction downfalls.

Experts say distracted workers have more unscheduled absences and higher medical expenses. Often, the mere mention of a sick co-worker can cause a distracted worker to ... Hey, I need new return address labels and I hate my old ones. So I just Googled it. There were 2.57 million hits.

And the bosses wonder why work isn't getting done.

An estimated 8 million adult Americans struggle with inattention disorders such as attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to researchers from Harvard Medical School. But, they say, only 20 percent realize it.

"It is very difficult for a person with an attention problem to survive in the workplace without being discovered," says Peter Freer, founder and chief executive officer of Play Attention, a new piece of technology that is supposed to retrain a brain to focus. "They'll start 20 or 30 projects and finish none of them."

Freer's Play Attention product is a helmet lined with sensors that monitor brain activity. The software is popped into the computer and the worker is instructed to focus on the computer screen and the tasks at hand.

For example, if a fax shows up on the computer screen, the user is to move it using only brainpower to the in-box. Same for a piece of junk mail that shows up; the user should concentrate until the mail lands in the trash can.

The more the user practices, the more the brain improves and gets used to being focused.

Anwar Robinson just got booted off "American Idol." Bummer.

I haven't used the Play Attention yet. Can you tell?