Strong relationships are formed by the exchange of attention. If you have even been on a video call with someone that seems clearly distracted, how does it make you feel? When the family is engaged with their individual phones while eating dinner, how connected does the family seem?

Attention is a way to deepen a connection. When we understand the function of attention, we can be more conscious of how we use it.

We frequently give too little thought to how best to manage distractions.

• Being pulled away from whatever you are focusing on right now damages productivity.
• The distractions come with greater stress, exhaustion, and physical pain.
• A 2.8-second interruption can cause a doubling in mistakes.
• Once you're interrupted, it takes nearly half an hour to return to the task.
• To achieve the same level of deep focus will take another 15-minutes.

Multitasking makes us better at being distracted and weakens self-control.

• Research shows that multitasking undermines performance, increases mistakes, and prevents deep learning.
• The more we multitask, the worse we tend to be at it.
• Multitasking undermines our ability to weed out the irrelevant. Everything feels like a priority.

Yet, many people are waking up to the essential importance of attention and prepare effective responses to improve the quality of attention.