Take Back Your Attention - The Energy Project - 0 views
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thinkahol * on 01 Mar 11As I sit down to write this blog, I'm facing a blank page. I know it's going to be difficult, because it always is. Maybe I'll just check my email first, or update on Facebook or Twitter, or read the morning headlines on The New York Times, or sneak a peak at Google Analytics, or read the comments readers have left overnight on my earlier posts. Something insidious has happened. The same device most of use to get our primary work accomplished - a computer, a smartphone, an iPad, or some combination of the above - is also now the repository of 1,000 distractions and every imaginable source of immediate gratification. As we seek to work, just a keystroke or two away we also have access to Google and YouTube, books and blogs, TV shows and movies, music and video games, email and texting, newspapers and magazines, and countless web sites and apps. We're free to indulge our every whim, no matter how trivial, and that's exactly what we do. The social critic Linda Stone has coined the term continuous partial attention to describe the fractured way we now focus. "With continuous partial attention," Stone explains, "we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges." Or something more alluring, reassuring, or simply less demanding. Staying singly focused on a task in this digital era is like trying to resist eating while sitting in a bakery as cookies, pies, cakes and tarts emerge fresh and fragrant from the oven. There's a reason Cinnabon points its air vents out into the corridors at airports. The easier it is to indulge our desires, the harder it is to exercise self-control.