Living in the Age of Twitter, Facebook and a Lifetime of Distractions
By Mark Monchek − July 30, 2009
Today it is harder than ever to pay attention to any one thing for very long. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, DVR, email, iPhones and smartphones, podcasts, surfing the net, changing the health care system, dealing with your demanding job and your more-demanding spouse and kids- there just isn’t enough time to attend to everything. The average employee works nine more weeks a year than they did in 1970. The average person today interacts with more people and does more things in one year than our great grandparents did in a lifetime.
Pay Attention – Your Life Depends On It
Your life is what you pay attention to. Think about that for a moment. If you are tweeting, Facebooking, thinking about your afternoon plans with the TV on in the background- stop. Focus on this one concept: your life is what you pay attention to. It might be the most important idea you think about today, or ever. In fact, it is such a powerful and daunting notion that your unconscious may just resist and cause you to pull away. Decide to stick with me and you just might get something done.
Here’s the question I’d like to pose: will we be hijacked by the use of technology in our life, or will we use it to get what we really want in our lives?
The first part of the answer involves a clear recognition that we have a crisis of attention that is not going to improve anytime soon. Technology just affords us too many benefits for us to stop using it, and our society is not calling for a slow-down. So it is up to each one of us to understand the crisis first, and then decide how we want to deal with it. To give you an idea of just how mainstream and pervasive this problem has become, note that CNN recently did an exposé on Facebook addiction, and offered some solutions in a helpful video. Surprisingly, their advice was primarily aimed at adults.
Consider these statistics:
- the average American teenager spends 6.5 hours per day in the electronic world;
- the average Fortune 1000 worker already is sending and receiving approximately 178 messages and documents each day, according to a recent study, “Managing Corporate Communications in the Information Age.” (Boles, M., 1997) Help! Information overload. Workforce, 76, 20.);
- Dr Dharma Singh Khalsa, in his book Brain Longevity, says the average American sees 16,000 advertisements, logos, and labels in a day. (“ Stressed? Maybe it’s information overload.” Sun Herald, 27.)
- Statistics show that we are interrupted every three minutes during the course of the work day. (Klingberg, T. (2008) The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory. Oxford University Press)
Can we multi-task our way out of it?
We use multi-tasking as a way to manage information overload. Yet over the past 20 years, leading researchers have burst the bubble on multi-tasking. When you assume you are doing two things at once, you are usually switching between them and losing a lot of efficiency along the way. Sam Anderson, in a recent New York Magazine article writes that “the brain processes different kinds of information on a variety of separate ‘channels’ -a language channel, a visual channel, an auditory channel, an emotional channel, etc., each of which can process only one stream of information at a time. If you overburden a channel, the brain becomes inefficient and mistake-prone.”1 He cites the classic example of driving when talking on a cell phone. Even on a hands-free phone your visual attention is being pulled from the road ahead to the act of imagining what the person on the other end is saying. Let’s say she is describing a piece of property you are thinking of buying. That conversation occupies your visual channel enough to impair your ability to see the road in front of you. That’s how accidents occur and it’s not a small problem. There are now a number of studies showing that cell phones are a leading cause of car crashes. It is estimated that cell phone-distracted drivers are four times more likely to be in an accident. According to a Harvard University study, cell phones cause over 200 deaths and half a million injuries each year.
Have we become a permanently frazzled society?
Multi-tasking works well when you are engaged in tasks that operate on entirely different channels. For example, preparing a meal (a visual-manual task) while listening to the news (a verbal task). Our culture prizes “doing” over “being” and we tend to follow suit. In return, we have a sort of a societal ADHD. The technology theorist Linda Stone coined the phrase continuous partial attention to describe the now-normal state of being continuously bombarded by too much information. This way of being creates a vicious cycle. Every interruption costs us around 25 minutes in lost productivity. That means we are spending a third of our day recovering from the myriad interruptions we all experience. The typical American worker receives 50-100 email messages per day and the amount is rising by 84 percent each year. A 2008 research study by Karen Renaud, at the University of Glasgow, revealed that employees working on a computer typically switch applications to view their emails as many as 30 or 40 times an hour, for anything from a few seconds to a minute. The study showed that people typically wait ONLY one minute and 44 seconds before acting upon a new email notification. Surprisingly, two thirds of email alerts get a reaction within six seconds! This is faster than letting the phone ring three times! We are like Pavlov’s dogs on Red Bull. Email keeps us stressed and unproductive; we rarely have time to consider the bigger picture in life. It’s easy to overlook what we truly care about, what we want to do with our lives or find the time to act on those things. We seldom stop and allow ourselves to be awed by the beauty of nature or the glimmer in a child’s eyes.
Email Addiction: Worse than Smoking Pot?
Email is the thing that now causes us the most problems in our working lives. It’s an amazing tool, but it’s gotten out of hand. Email harries you. You want to know what’s in there, especially if it’s from a family member or friends, or your boss, so you break off what you are doing to read the email. The problem is that when you go back to what you were doing, you’ve lost your chain of thought and, of course, you are less productive. People’s brains get tired from breaking off from something every few minutes to check emails. The more distracted you are by distractions, including email, the more tired and less productive you are.
Anderson, in his New York Magazine article, notes that people who check their emails frequently tested as less than intelligent that people who had just smoked a joint. Keep that in mind next time you get ready to sit down at your computer. And this is just distraction and stress from emails. David Meyer, one of the world’s leading experts on multi-tasking, warns that the damage from all this sensory overload will take decades to understand, and much longer to fix.
We Can Live the Focused Life If….
Winfred Gallagher, a writer who was faced with the ultimate challenge- living each day when faced with a potentially life-threatening disease- believes that we can take control of our attention. In her new book, Rapt- Attention and the Focused Life,2 she argues persuasively that paying attention is a skill that can be learned if you make the commitment. The simplest solution she offers is thousands of years old: meditation. More and more research each year shows the power of relatively short periods of meditation (20-30 minutes a day). It can significantly increase both concentration and awareness. Some research indicates that meditating on specific feelings like peace, compassion, or abundance, can change the brain itself and make it more capable of creating those thoughts on a regular basis and possibly those states themselves. Unfortunately, too many people think meditation is a mystical or religious activity, or that it is difficult to do. Meditation is quieting the mind to get to a deeper place of awareness and concentration. There are as many different forms of meditation as there are exercise, but like exercise it is consistency that counts the most. If you regularly spend 15 minutes a day being quiet you will find amazing benefits. The most overlooked and powerful benefit is the ability to focus your attention. Your period of meditation (or concentrated attention, if you will), gives you the opportunity to choose what you will attend to for the rest of the day and beyond. Exercise and nutrition are also extremely important in keeping our mind and body alert.
As you can see my core message here is choice. Gallagher says that “Once you understand how attention works and how you can make the most productive use of it, if you continue to just jump in the air every time your phone rings or pounce on those buttons each time you get an instant message, that’s not the machine’s fault. That’s your fault.”
Each day we are given a great choice: what do we pay attention to, and what is the quality of that attention? The most powerful weapon in the war on distraction is a clear purpose. A sense of purpose that inspires and focuses you will allow you to lead a life that is rewarding and well-lived. The people I know who are the happiest and get the most done are people who are passionate about a higher purpose and also believe that having fun along the way is genuinely important.
- In Defense of Distraction, Anderson, Sam. New York Magazine, May 17, 2009 http://nymag.com/news/features/56793/
- Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Gallagher, Winifred. Penguin Press, 2009
