Focus – the amount of time a person can concentrate on a single task without being distracted – is a funny thing. Research shows the average focus on a single screen task dropped from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to roughly 40-47 seconds in 2021.
Now it’s not for this Canary to explain why that is, but it is an extraordinary – wait what’s that outside my window…
Now focus is probably what you are paid for. Employers want you to focus on your job so that you can do something that makes something else just slightly better, be that a car door fitting, a withering putdown in a parliamentary debate, a clean window or a revolutionary new widget that you just thought of. Losing focus in the middle won’t get the job done now will it?
Here’s the thing though, the method for measuring focus when you are in a meeting has been around for over a quarter of a century, just waiting for the quality of real time transcription of the words you speak to catch up – which it did only quite recently.
It’s a measurement is called ‘Topic modelling’ which, if you want to get all cone headed about it, is ‘an unsupervised machine learning technique in natural language processing (NLP) used to discover hidden thematic structures (topics) in large collections of documents. By analysing word co-occurrence patterns, it automatically clusters frequently appearing words into coherent themes, making it an essential tool for exploratory data analysis, document classification, and information retrieval.’
Sorry what did you say, that took me 48 seconds to read and I only got half way?
Well, worry not, your feathered friend has your back again, Meeting Canary can analyse whether the themes you have in a meeting cluster sensibly and can give you a running, real-time score, to help you focus on getting the job done!
With the data we have on focus from millions of meeting minutes we can also show how focus declines after 1 hour. Same as energy oddly!
So next time you feel you’re losing focus, keep an eye on Meeting Canary’s focus dial, and maybe step into the meeting and try and get it back on track – or at least insert enough energy that the focus comes sharply back.
And make it quick, as at this rate by 2030 we’ll probably be down to attention spans being about the same as a… hang on the phones pinging me, byee!