Cyberloafing: The Silent Productivity Killer at Work and Life – How to Beat It!

We’ve Been Click Baited

Cyberloafing is staying glued to the internet for hours on end. It is the act of searching and scrolling through content whether we have an urgent need for it or not. It is where we are searching for random things online. Chances are you have indulged in cyberloafing yourselves.

Every new search leads you to a new rabbit hole you are stuck for few hours. We say to ourselves, “I’m just going to check my email” or look at “that one text” and then we find that we’ve spent three hours perusing Facebook.

The best solution most times is to understand that its ok to not know what’s trending and who wore what on the red carpet. Simply cut your losses and move on.

Read more HERE about how to free yourself from the tyranny of digital distractions.

How Work Has Changed Over The Past Decade

The onset of the digital revolution brought in a lot of changes in our lives along with how we engage ourselves in our professional lives. In 2016, this is how we balanced work and home:

We became the integrators, separators, the fusion lovers and the cyclers.

Here is how these individual groups operate between work and personal life.

Integrators: Work and home blend.
Separators: Clear line between work and personal life. Very low tech at home.
The Fusion lover: Almost completely mix work with personal life.
The Cycler: Switches between integrating and separating work and home.

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Average Time Spent In a Lifetime © broadbandsearch.net

Cited Work: Image Source can be found HERE.

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Countering Our Productivity

Technology was supposed to be a super cool addition to make our hectic lives as efficient as possible. Instead, it has turned out to be the main stay of our lives, while we try to work on our big goals in the margins. We are fighting daily matches of distractions to eke out a few minutes here and there between our social media and Internet consumption to work on our serious personal and professional goals.

We are living in a world of information avalanches that are choking up the internet and in turn our brain waves. The first lesson on the harmful effects of Email itself should be a great reminder. “Email is someone else’s important agenda for you to work on.”

What Is Digital Drama?

Our youth today also have to deal with bullying and drama online now because of how connected they have become with each other through technology. They have more avenues of staying connected than us, through texts, emails, online gaming, video chat and of course, social media.

These are fertile grounds for conflicts to arise, and a perfect tool for bullies to hide behind anonymity of user names and target people.

And this is the life of a teen and an adult online these days. There’s no shortage of digital drama. Read more about it HERE.

Understanding Multitasking And Attention Residue

Here’s the thing with multitasking. You have to perform a little amount of thinking to get back on track each time you switch between things. People find it challenging to switch between tasks. Context switching is the process through which your brain switches from one task to the next.

Researchers that looked into this discovered that attempting to multitask with three or more things at once results in spending significantly more time switching between tasks than actually complete the assignment.

Read more HERE on how to manage our focus currency while staying on task.

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There should be equal emphasis on E.Q. and how you interact with people, how you relate to people, and how you connect with people. And even in a world where more and more machines and technology are disrupting the way we do business and the way we all connect, a lot of the value is still created through human interaction and the ability to motivate people or get people to move in a direction with you.
~ Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, who moonlights as DJ D-Sol, spoke these words at a college career fair in 2019 about the hardest skills to hire for today.

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Digital Disruption And Adaptability

As work continues to get more automated, only our unique value proposition as humans will set us apart from machines. As such, qualities like our unlimited imagination, our creativity and our drive to make a difference will become even more invaluable.

If we must continue our work towards using Technology as a tool to make our life convenient and efficient and not become a puppet in its hands, we must learn to navigate the digital age without forgetting our core strengths.

In the end, our world is a product of our imagination and vision and not the exponential output of the machines we’re building. Only humans can communicate effectively with others, manage, delegate and resolve differences. Only we can learn on the job, be emotionally flexible towards experiences and adopt positive role models. In the end, it’s our understanding of what gives us humans a competitive edge over machines.

While schools drive academic accomplishments, lets also teach our 21st Century children essential life skills. So, they can take on any job with the top 3 skills colleges and employers want: Perseverance, Creativity and Adaptability, and with emotional flexibility and self confidence that they need.

Read more HERE on the necessity of non-cognitive skills for our digital future at work.

The Top 3 Trends Shaping Work

Find it HERE.

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Truth About Technology – A Digital Literacy Project