Joel Liu's Bookmarks tagged Distraction →  View Popular

Focusing on one task to the exclusion of others isn't even an option anymore. When experts examine the detrimental effects of multitasking on productivity, they're asking the wrong question. We don't need to wonder about the ways in which multitasking and interruption impair our ability to speed through a task. We need to appreciate the ways in which multitasking and interruption have become essential to meeting the increasingly nonlinear demands of our jobs.

Chesterfield described dirt as matter out of place. Distracting
is, similarly, desirable at the wrong time. And technology is
continually being refined to produce more and more desirable things.
Which means that as we learn to avoid one class of distractions,
new ones constantly appear, like drug-resistant bacteria.

I remember when computers were, for me at least, exclusively for
work. I might occasionally dial up a server to get mail or ftp
files, but most of the time I was offline. All I could do was write
and program. Now I feel as if someone snuck a television onto my
desk. Terribly addictive things are just a click away. Run into
an obstacle in what you're working on? Hmm, I wonder what's new
online. Better check.

After years of carefully avoiding classic time sinks like TV, games,
and Usenet, I still managed to fall prey to distraction, because
I didn't realize that it evolves. Something that used to be safe,
using the Internet, gradually became more and more dangerous. Some
days I'd wake up, get a cup of tea and check the news, then check
email, then check the news again, then answer a few emails, then
suddenly notice it was almost lunchtime and I hadn't gotten any real
work done. And this started to happen more and more often.

At first I tried rules. For example, I'd tell myself I was only
going to use the Internet twice a day. But these schemes never
worked for long. Eventually something would come up that required
me to use it more than that. And then I'd gradually slip back
into my old ways.

“I feel that much of my life is ebbing away in the tide of minute-by-minute
distraction . . . I’m not certain what the effect on the world will be. But
psychologists do say that intense close engagement with things does provide
the most human satisfaction.” The psychologists are right. McKibben
describes himself as “loving novelty” and yet “craving depth”, the
contemporary predicament in a nutshell.

Ironically, the companies most active in denying us our craving for depth, the
great distracters – Microsoft, Google, IBM, Intel – are trying to do
something about this. They have formed the Information Overload Research
Group, “dedicated to promoting solutions to e-mail overload and
interruptions”. None of this will work, of course, because of the
overwhelming economic forces involved. People make big money out of
distracting us. So what can be done?

The computer is training us not to attend, to drown in the sea of information
rather than to swim. Jackson thinks this can be fixed. The brain is
malleable. Just as it can be trained to be distracted, so it can be trained
to pay attention. Education and work can be restructured to teach and
propagate the skills of concentration and focus. People can be taught to
turn off, to ignore the beep and the ping.