After a holiday in Portugal, I’ve concluded we’ll never have complete peace and quiet again. On one particular day, I witnessed:
- A middle-aged couple helping their son settle into New Zealand university digs via FaceTime on loudspeaker.
- Two younger couples watching YouTube videos on loudspeaker while tutting at each other’s volume in a sound arms race.
- A family of five at a café, each absorbed in their own device, not looking up when food arrived.
- A constant stream of people video-chatting while walking, sharing life’s minutiae.
As a middle-aged man, evolution dictates I should find modern life irritating. You might think I should have said something, but I’ve tried before – it’s rarely pleasant. I was trying to relax, and it would’ve been like whack-a-mole since this behavior is omnipresent. This was at the beach – surely the last bastion of peace and quiet?
How this translates to the world of work
It’s easy to blame phones and laptops when focus disappears. But distraction goes well beyond screens.
People lose concentration not just because of apps, but also because of interrupt-driven work cultures, constant context switching, meeting overload, and the unspoken belief that responsiveness trumps deep thinking.
I know people who can’t get a 30-minute stretch without being pinged, asked to ‘jump on a call’, or pulled into another Slack thread. And in some organisations, a culture of faux urgency prevails, where everything is all-important, all at once.
Distraction is a systems problem, not a personal failing
In Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, Johann Hari argues that we’ve misunderstood the problem. It’s not that people have poor attention spans, but that we live in environments hostile to sustained thinking.
He describes how attention has been ‘stolen’ by systems designed to monetise distraction – yes, social media, but also the hyper-productivity culture that expects people to multitask endlessly without burnout.
It’s the same pattern at work: we treat our people as if they should be available at all times, reward busyness over progress, and confuse visible activity with meaningful work.
Coaching people to focus again
Tim Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Work shows us a better path. He argued that performance equals potential minus interference. And interference isn’t just doubt or fear – it’s also the clutter we allow into our mental space.
Coaches, internal or external, can be a counterbalance. Our job isn’t to offer time management hacks but to help people notice the sources of interference and experiment with ways of reducing it.
That might mean creating better boundaries, designing ‘focus blocks’ in the calendar, or simply permitting people to turn off notifications. It also means exploring the emotional roots of distraction: what are they avoiding? What discomfort are they papering over with movement?
Managers need to stop rewarding noise
Too often, we celebrate those who send emails at midnight, rush between back-to-back meetings, or reply to everything within minutes. But that behaviour isn’t sustainable, and it’s certainly not strategic.
Managers need to model the opposite. Block time for deep work. Encourage reflection. Ask outcome-based questions, not just “What are you working on?” And perhaps above all, get comfortable with silence. Not everything needs a constant stream of check-in messages.
We need a culture that respects focus
If we’re serious about reducing burnout and increasing impact, we must build cultures that see focus as a shared responsibility.
That means:
- Protecting people’s time instead of treating it as infinitely flexible.
- Being crystal clear on priorities – so employees don’t have to guess.
- Creating quiet spaces (both literal and metaphorical) for thinking.
- Redefining productivity as what gets done, not how fast we look doing it.
Some of the best leaders I’ve coached do something deceptively simple: they give people permission to slow down, think, and question, rather than race ahead. It’s amazing what happens when that becomes the norm.
Let’s not allow modern work to become the digital equivalent of a noisy beach.
It must be me
My IT support guy was here today as I wrote this article. He’s twenty-something and tech-savvy so obviously has a different worldview from me. I asked him, what would you do if you just wanted to sit and quietly listen to the natural beach sounds?
He said, “Oh, I’d have just put my headphones in and downloaded a beach sounds app.”
