Maggie Jackson, writer and columnist

We’ve all heard of the distracted pilots who overshot the Minneapolis airport. But did you know that medical errors due to distraction place many people in danger every day?

A reader sent me a fascinating dispatch from the medical world on a series of San Francisco-area programs to reduce medical errors while nurses are dispensing medications. Nurses reduced their errors nearly 90 percent at nine Bay-area hospitals over the past year, and a key to the effort lay in new techniques to reduce distractions.

You can imagine what happens. Hospitals are busy places, with the level of care growing more complex by the day. A nurse dispensing medicine at bedside gets interrupted, mixes up one medicine for another, and the results can be fatal. Errors in administering medicine cause 400,000 preventable injuries in hospitals and $3.5 billion in extra medical costs annually, according to the Institute of Medicine.

The focus on distractions at Kaiser South San Francisco Medical Center began with orange vests – similar to those construction workers wear, according to an article in Nursezone, an online news site for the field. Quality-control nurses thought that wearing the vests as a kind of walking “do not disturb” sign could reduce interruptions during pill dispensing.

At first, floor nurses balked, seeing the vests as “cheesy” and “demeaning.” But first results showed that two units cut their errors in half in just four or five months simply by using the vests and educating nurses about reducing distractions.

The word spread throughout the hospital and across the Kaiser system, and a test of nine hospitals reduced medical dispensing distractions about 88 percent in the past year. The larger program includes many more safety steps from checking patient identity twice to turning up the lights and – my particular favorite – turning down the television. (I recall taking my then-two daughter to the dentist for the first time and watching amazed as the hygienist tried to give her a first brushing lesson with the tv blaring. Since then, I’ve always switch off the tv when a dentist or assistant come in the room.)

As a result of the intervention, giving medicines is “a more focused process,” says Suzi Kim, RN, BSN, and a staff nurse at Kaiser West Los Angeles hospital. Without interruptions, “we can think clearly.”

And if hospital staff can think clearly, perhaps they can do more to see and treat the whole human being. I hope so. As important as these anti-distraction programs are, procedures shouldn’t be the end of the story. While medical folks need to focus to do their work correctly and to problem-solve, they also need to restore focus to their interaction with the patient.

That’s the topic of my next blog, which will run tomorrow.

Months ago, Cali Williams Yost had a wish. In her FastCompany blog, she hoped that Distracted would start an attention movement similar to the new environmentalism sparked by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. And indeed, wherever I speak, people everywhere are asking, ‘where do we start? How do we regain our focus and spark the ‘renaissance of attention’ that you describe in your book?’

Well, that nascent movement just may be starting to pick up speed. Some signs:

 People are talking. There are debates and discussions everywhere about our crisis of distraction. At work, people are drilling down into the roots of overload. At home, parents aren’t smiling much anymore about their kids’ addiction to texting. A new study showing the inefficiencies of multitasking is inspiring heated debate. (See my previous post on the research.) This is important. It’s time to come together and focus on the problem. That’s how solutions get sown.

 People are acting.  A Seattle University communications professor recently held an innovative faculty workshop on the impact of distraction on student life. Professors everywhere are frustrated by a chronic lack of attention in the classroom. But organizer Mara Adelman coaxed the discussion beyond griping and finger-wagging.

At the workshop, faculty talked about setting up clear, firm rules on tech use in class and holding kids accountable – no attention, no recommendation. But faculty also did a lot of soul-searching, according to the wonderful website that Adelman set up to keep the momentum of the event going. They talked about collectively working through “technoquette” issues, role modeling focus in their lives, and reminding one another and students how opportunities for connection and conversation are lost amidst epidemic distraction. One faculty member wrote later, “I used to complain about distraction but never spent time to analyze this problem. This workshop made me sit down and find ways to control distraction in my personal life and in the classroom.”

This is exciting, and it’s not a one-off example. I’ve heard of others crafting training events based on my book and other resources. Add to this the uptick in both state and employer bans on driving distracted, and I see the makings of a 360-degree movement.

Write to me if you have ideas on how to move the process forward!

PS – Check out this great blog post by Andrea Saveri, one of my favorite thinkers, on multitasking and the often overly simplistic discussions that erupt when we debate about the impact of technology on our lives. Hear, hear!

It’s late, and I’m flying to the Midwest tomorrow, so this will be short. But I want to chime in a bit on a new, small but important research study out of Stanford this week. There are already a number of media outlets writing about the study, which in a nutshell indicates that heavy multitaskers aren’t doing their juggling all that well. This is important. While we’ve seen a tremendous body of research showing that most multitasking is inefficient and error-prone, somehow there’s always been an assumption by many that heavy multitaskers can “do it” well. And that doesn’t appear to be true. Practice does help a little. For instance, air traffic controllers can scan a screen and juggle flights better than laypeople. But heavy multitasking doesn’t help boost focus or thinking skills, at least according to this study published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by veteran researcher Clifford Nass and colleagues.

When asked to do simple task-switching in a lab setting, students who were heavy media multitaskers were constantly distracted by irrelevant data, and even did a lousy job of remembering what they were supposed to be doing. Wow. “They couldn’t help thinking about the task they weren’t doing,” said researcher Eyal Ophir in a Stanford press release. ”The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can’t keep things separate in their minds.”

Sure, lab experiments aren’t the end of the story. But the study - which I’ve read in the original - clearly shows that heavy multitaskers are deficient in voluntary cognitive control while trying to perform simple task-switching. In other words, they are poor at controlling their focus, and “suckers for irrelevancy,” as Clifford Nass attests. That’s a disturbing finding, whatever cognitive benefits we may later discover in multitasking.

Certainly, attention is so all-encompassing and so crucial to our survival that we’re often not aware, so to speak, of how much information we’re processing in our environment and within what William James called our “stream of consciousness.” We are in many senses born interrupt-driven; to survive we have to be ever-alert to new stimuli in our environment. (And work by Jonathan Schooler indicates that mind-wandering may be good for creativity.) But at the same time, effortful attention, along with working memory, are keys to pursuing our goals. If we can’t sort out the irrelevant in a simple brief lab task, chances are we’re not doing such a great job in the wider, complex world. (And given the plasticity of our brains, it’s not unimaginable that heavy multitasking does shape and even undermine our ability to focus deeply, evaluate and assess the information around us.)

 Drinking from the fire hose of media today may have its benefits, just as videogaming has been found to boost some types of visual attention. But let’s keep the big picture in mind. If we sacrifice cognitive control in the name of high-speed, reactive, distracted living, then the costs of multitasking will be steep indeed.

We’re so busy, so “productive,” ticking off items off our agendas, clicking through over-stuffed in-boxes. But in what sense are we productive ? Could it be that we are racing ahead in the most shallow senses of the word?

 This is a particularly timely question as we reap the fall-out from an era of unprecedented, and often unthinking abundance. By unthinking, I mean activity without thought to consequence, to ourselves and others. Activity without perspective, especially on the future. Isn’t that the core of what’s been happening in terms of the environment, crimes like Madoff’s, and even the disintegration of deep family rhythms and rituals?

A short but important column in the U.K.’s Guardian newpaper this past weekend drives to the heart of this question of the cult of busyness.

“Telling ourselves we’re hugely stressed makes us feel important, in demand, even energised; it also gives us permission to avoid confronting deeper issues,” writes Oliver Burkeman.

 He writes, “… busyness is the perfect excuse: if you’re convinced that you’re overstretched and overwhelmed, you’re spared the terrifying prospect of actually doing the things, and making the changes, that you want - or say that you want, since busyness spares you from examining that question, too.”

  Notice the word “terrifying.” Burkeman’s comments remind me of a man I met at a futurist conference who spoke glowingly of his new cell phone that worked globally. (This was a while back.) He told the audience, “Now, I never have to be alone.”

  Yes, it’s often terrifying to be alone with oneself. And it’s terrifying to take responsibility for ourselves - and for the care and keeping of our world.

   Addendum: A site called Sharp Brains and a blog called Neuronarrative both have posted email-interviews with me about Distracted. In both cases, the questions were intriguing.