Why We Miss the Work That’s Right in Front of Us

When hurricanes remind us of our inattentional blindness and invisible labor

Reviewed by Davia Sills

Key points

• Researchers reveal we fail to notice things “right in front of our eyes.”
• Everyday work can become invisible to others because their inattentional blindness focuses on other tasks.
• Our minds filter out gradual, everyday changes, allowing us to focus on immediate concerns.

As Floridians experienced a second hurricane in as many weeks, daily agendas were halted. The stress over client deadlines, school carpools, and even Monday night sporting events faded into the background. Instead, it became clear what really mattered: preparing for the storm and the safety and well-being of friends and family.

While the rest of the world may not have been aware of the preparation and devastation of the first hurricane, the heightened global media attention around Hurricane Milton may have caught people’s attention. Yet, even with a major event unfolding, many remain preoccupied with their daily tasks. This is how inattentional blindness works. Even when something catastrophic is happening right in front of us, our brains often tune it out if we’re focused elsewhere.

What Is Inattentional Blindness?

In a series of remarkable experiments, researchers demonstrated that while participants were engaged in a simple counting exercise, they failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit beating their chest, a woman holding an umbrella, or even a loud electronic noise. This phenomenon, known as inattentional blindness, reveals that although we may feel as though we are fully perceiving the world around us—simultaneously hearing, tasting, smelling, and feeling—in truth, the human brain processes only a small fraction of the sensory information available at any given moment.

In many ways, invisible work falls victim to the same phenomenon. For example, it’s not that we don’t see the work of mothers, partners, coworkers, or friends—we just don’t register it because their contributions are constant, spun into daily life, and often hidden in plain sight “right in front of our eyes,” which Harvard scholar Jeremy Wolfe and colleagues identified in 2022 as “normal blindness.”

It’s the way our minds filter out gradual, everyday changes in our environment, allowing us to focus on more immediate concerns. It’s why we can walk through a neighborhood day after day and suddenly realize we hadn’t noticed the changing leaves or a new building being constructed. Given how dramatic inattentional blindness can be, as shown in laboratory studies, it has far-reaching consequences for the social dynamics and interactions we experience in everyday environments, whether in everyday life, at work, or at home.

The Hidden Effort of Everyday Life

Consider the myriad of tasks throughout a day for parents: preparing meals, organizing schedules, cleaning, tutoring, Ubering the kids around, and so much more. Much of this happens in the background, and over time, we stop noticing until someone is not there, and things start to get missed.

The same can be said for the growth of children; we may not have noticed that our child grew two inches until Uncle G. arrives and says, “Wow, nephew, you’ve grown. You’re almost as tall as me.” And then it suddenly hits us—we hadn’t noticed.

The Cost of Not Noticing at Work

Inattentional blindness can have serious consequences in the workplace. Researchers remind us that when employees are focused on a specific task, they miss crucial details around them. While these unnoticed details may not be as obvious as a man in a gorilla suit, their consequences can be significant.

Think about how the overlooked resulted in the Space Shuttle Challenger’s O-Ring failure, Enron’s flawed financials, the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, and the Champlain Towers South collapse. These weren’t cases of willful ignorance but underscore the importance of noticing key information. This raises critical questions about what vital details we, and the brain, may overlook in our work environments.

This blindness can affect our work environment. Take Sam, a 7-year-seasoned employee who juggles not only her job but manages coworker’s emotional needs, responsible for building trust across departments, resolves conflicts, and organizes team events. Over time, her contributions become invisible to those around her. And much like the fading of daylight, this work becomes part of the background.

Since it happens continuously, we hardly notice it at all until the day Sam abruptly quits, employee morale drops, and others start to leave. Only then do people realize the invisible threads Sam was holding together all along.

This happens in everyday office work, but the consequences can often be more subtle. We fail to hear the details in a meeting as we’re focused on that other email, or we fail to see the emotional labor, the small acts of kindness, and the invisible work that keeps the workplace functioning smoothly. It’s not until things drop or start to fall apart that we realize what we’ve been missing all along.

How Social Media Reinforces Our Blindness

If you’ve ever scrolled through social media without really absorbing the content, you’ve experienced inattentional blindness firsthand. With the short bursts of posts (words or images) we cannot give depth to life or reality; yet we falsely feel so connected to our friends that we are blind to the pain that someone may be experiencing. Our scrolling is so habitual that we stop responding to stimuli that are constantly present and unchanging, as the brain deems them non-threatening or unimportant.

Over time, the constant barrage of familiar content dulls our senses, and we tune out, missing many important things that need our attention. So, that social picture may shield the emptiness of your 20-year-old friendship; however, if you went to visit them or just picked up the phone, would you see something more?

Being aware of inattentional blindness is not just about seeing a gorilla in a video or noticing a building going up in your neighborhood. It’s about recognizing the invisible work around us, whether it’s the labor of parents, the emotional support from coworkers, or the subtle changes in relationships that go unnoticed until it’s too late. Without this work, our communities would be disrupted.

Much like preparing for a hurricane, there is a constant effort happening in the background that keeps everything afloat. And if we don’t start paying attention, we might only notice when it’s too late.