Our lives are full of demands for our attention. Multiple devices, that we’re more integrated with than ever before, provide an incessant stream of reminders, and suggestions for things that we should be focused on.

Barriers to success – are your people driven to distraction?

Do your steps. Achieve your monthly goal. Log your food intake. The decibel level around you is dangerous for your ears!

We’d suggest the constant noise is dangerous for the brain.

“Our brains do have the ability to process the information we take in,” says Daniel J Levitan, author of The Organized Mind’, “but at a cost: We can have trouble separating the trivial from the important, and all this information processing makes us tired.”

The noise then demands that we make decisions. As we’ve discussed in previous blogs, humans prefer to find mental shortcuts than to evaluate every decision logically. The digitalisation of the modern world means that people are asked to make more decisions than ever before.

I need to respond to the text immediately. I need to research the latest purchase for the children or house. The unread email count is growing daily – do I ignore or answer them?

When people had less distractions, we were able to share some of this mental load by a method defined by cognitive scientists as ‘externalizing.’ There were sales assistants to help us choose our purchases, travel agents to help us book a holiday, whilst a delay in the receipt of postal mail meant that a delayed response was expected.

So, how can we, as people influencers, break through and focus minds on the tasks that can make a difference to the prosperity and sanity of our teams and still meet the strategic needs of our business?

Ways to break through and be heard

The irony is that we enjoy the constant plate spinning of life. The speed and instant gratification for completing small tasks, like answering a text message immediately, fool us in to believing that we’re making progress and give us a hit of dopamine by triggering the reward centre of our brain, which, incidentally, also has a bias for the newest and shiniest thing that’s happened to us, even if that’s a new unread email.

So, how do we connect with the overloaded people that we’d like to help us achieve our strategy? At BI WORLDWIDE, being aware of the individual’s environment, their capacity for action, and how we connect with them is a huge part of designing an incentive programme that achieves your strategic objectives.

Here are some things that could help:

• Externalizing: Giving support for the tasks that take your people away from the things that make a difference. Do they have the right tools to make these tasks simple? If deal registration is difficult but you know there’s a tool to help them do it more efficiently, communicate it with the incentive programme.
• Hardwired pathways: Make the smaller everyday tasks a force of habit. We want employees and channel teams to hardwire their own path and begin to do it without adding to their mental load as it frees up more capacity for bigger tasks and challenges.
• Minimising noise: Let’s make sure communications are salient and vivid. Only communicate when you have something to say and make sure there’s a choice. Email is a notorious culprit for adding to people’s mental load. Joined up, consistent messaging from you in the way they’d like to receive it can make all the difference.