“Understanding ourselves, navigating the world around us, making sense of others, and recognising the impact we have on them. Because who are we, really, if not shaped by one another?”
Happy Thursday, everyone. I’m Shaida Darian, a Business and Organisational Psychologist. I’m fascinated by three questions: Why does this happen? What can we do about it? And when should we act? Join me down the rabbit hole. With any luck, we’ll find Wonderland.
This week in workplace whiplash 🌀
Airbus’s return-to-office plan hit some turbulence.
Airbus has scaled back plans to bring employees into the office four days a week following protests and industrial action in Spain. Managers can now retain arrangements allowing two remote-working days a week, highlighting how quickly the flexibility debate can become a negotiation about trust, autonomy and retention.
Read the story - ReutersMore security for zero-hours workers may come with a price tag.
As the UK prepares reforms giving qualifying workers greater predictability over hours and shift changes, CIPD research found that 65% of employers expect HR and management costs to rise, while 31% anticipate redundancies. The challenge will be whether greater security for workers can be introduced without reducing the opportunities the reforms are designed to improve.
Read the story - People ManagementUK factories are hiring, even as growth loses momentum.
UK manufacturing activity slowed to a five-month low in August, but employers increased staffing at the fastest rate in more than two years. It is an unusual labour-market contradiction: businesses are becoming more cautious about output while simultaneously showing enough confidence to recruit.
Read the story - Reuters
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Thursday Reflections
It’s a familiar feeling at the end of the working day: a desktop full of open tabs, a half-finished document, and the uncomfortable realisation that eight hours somehow disappeared into reacting. We leave tired, frustrated, and wondering why we couldn’t stay focused on what actually mattered.
I’m Shaida Darian, a Business and Organisational Psychologist, and I see this frustration play out in teams all the time. We tend to blame ourselves: more discipline, more willpower, better concentration. But I’m increasingly interested in the quieter forces shaping how we work: the systems, norms and habits we barely notice.
What feels different now is the rhythm. There is always something else waiting: an email, a message, a meeting, another tab, another update. We move between them so routinely that checking, switching and responding no longer feel like interruptions. They simply feel like work.
Technology has made us faster, more connected and more efficient. But a quieter trade-off may be hiding in plain sight: the more efficiently everything competes for our attention, the harder it becomes to give any one thing our full attention.
Which brings me to the question: are we becoming more efficient at work, or simply more efficient at dividing our attention?
🧠The organisational science lens
What looks like a lack of concentration may actually be something we have learned.
Recent research suggests that repeated digital behaviours can take on increasingly habitual characteristics. What begins as a deliberate decision to check a message, an update or a notification can become something we do almost automatically. We stop needing something to interrupt us; increasingly, we interrupt ourselves.
Then there is the question of effort. A recent theoretical framework proposes that constant access to quick, low-effort stimulation may change how we evaluate the effort required by more demanding tasks. Our ability to concentrate has not necessarily disappeared. Sustained thinking simply has far more competition than it once did.
And every switch carries a cost. Psychologist Sophie Leroy describes this as “attention residue”: when we move from one unfinished task to another, some of our attention can remain caught on what we left behind. We may have moved on physically, but cognitively, part of us is still somewhere else.
The workplace can amplify this pattern. Recent research on instant messaging found exactly the trade-off we might expect: it helped employees access information and accomplish tasks, while also increasing perceived interruption and the need to recover afterwards. Earlier experimental work found that interrupted workers compensated by working faster, but reported greater stress, frustration and mental effort.
So perhaps the problem is not that people have suddenly lost the discipline to focus. The tools helping us move work forward may also be fragmenting the experience of doing it.
🚀What this means for leaders
If fragmented attention is partly shaped by the way we currently work, asking employees to simply “focus harder” will only get us so far. Leaders can start by changing the environment around attention:
Define what deserves immediacy: Be clear about what genuinely requires an immediate response and what can wait. Research on constant connectivity suggests that visible communication habits between colleagues can reinforce expectations of being permanently available. Leaders need to make slower responses socially acceptable, rather than merely telling people they are allowed to disconnect.
Protect focus collectively: Individual focus time is difficult to maintain when everyone else continues to interrupt it. Create shared periods where meetings and non-urgent communication are reduced. Research linking external interruption with later self-interruption suggests that protecting attention may require changing the rhythm of the team, not just the habits of the individual.
Design out unnecessary interruption: Review notifications, communication channels and default settings rather than assuming every update deserves immediate attention. Simply removing one device may not solve the problem; distraction can migrate elsewhere. The goal is not less technology, but more deliberate technology.
💬 Final thoughts
We built technology to remove friction from work. Somewhere along the way, we may also have removed the pauses that allowed us to think.
A faster reply, another notification, one more tab, another quick switch, and none of them feels particularly costly on its own. But stacked together, they can turn an entire working day into fragments. We remain busy, responsive and connected, while the work that requires depth quietly competes for whatever attention is left.
Perhaps the real productivity crisis is not that we have too little time. It is that too many things have learned how to reach us at once.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Until next week,
Frank
P.S. What steals your attention most often at work: other people, technology, or your own impulse to check? Reply and tell me.
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