A New Way to Mute Distractions

You’re five minutes in to a project when you see a new email appear in your inbox. Or you hear the little ping signaling a Slack message. Or you can feel a colleague shuffling over to your desk. You click over to answer it, or to say hi to your co-worker—and fifteen minutes later, you’re still not back at it.

Efficient multitasking is, for the most part, a myth. We’re not good at it. But studiously avoiding multitasking stresses us out, too. One study even suggested that simply dwelling on an unanswered email lurking in our inbox can make employees feel distracted, unleash a surge of the stress hormone cortisol, and negatively impact short-term job performance, The Guardian reported. But in our “interruption culture,” there are always stimuli jostling for our attention. It’s almost impossible to work with blinders on.