We all know that Facebook and other social media channels can be a distracting influence, but a new study shows just how disruptive these activities can be. In a project that looked at the behavior of 300 students, researcher Larry Rosen found that checking Facebook even once in a 15-minute period correlated with lower levels of academic performance.
The results were startling. First, these students were only able to focus and stay on task for an average of three minutes at a time and nearly all of their distractions came from technology… One additional result stunned us: If they checked Facebook just once during the 15-minute study period they were worse students. It didn’t matter how many times they looked at Facebook; once was enough. [From Psychology Today – Attention Alert: A Study on Distraction Reveals Some Surprises by Larry Rosen.]
Loss of Focus
The issue is clearly one of focus. The lower-performing students were less able to focus on what they were learning. Not only were they influenced by external factors, like beeps or buzzes notifying them of new activity, but also by inner factors, like wondering if anyone had replied to their Facebook post yet.
Protect Yourself
According to Rosen, the techniques employed by the most successful students were to defer distractions. Even when the experimenters deliberately texted subjects during a learning process, some waited to respond until after important points were being made. They did better on subsequent testing than those subjects who responded immediately.
Of course, the best way to avoid loss of focus from social media and other technology distractions is to simply disengage from them for periods of time. Log out of Twitter, shut down Facebook, ignore your email, etc. during those times when you want to concentrate.
