…but when you are on the phone with a friend and doing the laundry at the same time, I do not notice any impact. But, when I am on a company phone conference and I am typing an email, I am not very present to either the cost can be great. It cost me big time once when I did that and answered an email half baked about a friends father who passed away and didn’t even mention it to her. She never forgave me for that.

According to an article in The New York Magazine, Meet the Life Hacker…In a study by Gloria Marks a scientist of “human-computer interactions” at the University of California at Irvine who studies how high-tech devices affect our behavior…”Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task.”

It’s no wonder so many people feel overwhelmed, scattered and anxious today – and no wonder the Harvard Business Review reported in 2002 that fully 90% of managers and knowledge workers squander their time in all sorts of ineffective activities and a mere 10% spend their time in a committed, purposeful, and reflective manner.

Yes, interesting enough, I have noticed that when I am FULLY Focused on the task at hand, whether I am writing a document, or speaking to a person, something interesting occurs. I am left satisfied, fulfilled and with aliveness…even little miracles seem to happen around me. Can’t explain it but something is at play that works.