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Our inability to connect, reflect and relax is eroding our ability for deep focus and awareness, says Maggie Jackson, the author of "Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age." And we're hurt by this at home and work. What, if anything, can be done?
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By Ellen Pearlman
Strategic Thinker:
Maggie Jackson
Credentials:
Jackson is a journalist who writes the "Balancing Acts" column for the Boston Globe. Her work has also appeared on National Public Radio and in The New York Times and other publications. Her first book was "What's Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in The Information Age."
Big Idea:
Our inability to connect, reflect and relax is eroding our ability for deep focus and awareness
Book: "Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age," published by Prometheus Books, June 2008
Column: "Balancing Acts," Boston Globe
I'm sure that Maggie Jackson's book was intended to shake people up. Just look at the tagline of her book, "Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and The Coming Dark Age." It's impossible to read her carefully researched book and not come away with a sense of dread about what our fast paced, mobile, distracted lives are leading us to. And it's not just our kids who are busy—simultaneously doing their homework, texting, listening to music, watching TV and talking on the phone - and losing the ability to focus and pay attention. It's also us, the adults who are suffering from a form of ADD, unable to concentrate and stay focused on the problems we need to solve as we suffer through one interruption after another (a phone call, a colleague who drops in uninvited, 400 e-mails, an urgent text message, another endless, pointless meeting).
After finishing Jackson's book I sat down to read my e-mail and ponder the meaning of her words. I started to read an article at the WashingtonPost.com and found this little gem in the lead paragraph to Robert Kaiser's August 1 article, The Curious Mind of John McCain:
"In his 2002 book, Worth the Fighting For, John McCain offered this confession-an acknowledgment of a restless mind: "Although I seem to tolerate introspection better the older I am, there are still too many claims on my attention to permit more than the briefest excursions down the path of self-awareness. When I am no longer busy with politics, and with my own ambitions, I hope to have more time to examine what I have done and failed to do with my career, and why."
I couldn't help but wonder, if one of our candidates for President suffers from a lack of attention, what hope is there for the rest of us?
The way we live, says Jackson, is "eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention-the building block of intimacy, wisdom and cultural progress." Back in 1890, psychologist and philosopher William James recognized that attention is the "brain's conductor, leading the orchestration of our minds." But in an era of distraction and multitasking we are losing our ability to maintain our focus and are "slipping toward a new dark age," according to Jackson. It's not that we don't continue to have technological advancement and innovation. We've still got plenty of that. But according to the author, a period of flux can lead to great gains but can still result in a declining civilization.
Jackson cites many statistics and studies throughout the book that are indicative of the problems we face as a result of the fragmented way we are living. Here are a few of them:
- A yearlong study found that workers not only switch tasks every three minutes during the workday, but nearly half the time they interrupt themselves. It takes them about 28 minutes on average to resume their original work.
- Interruptions take up 2.1 hours of an average knowledge worker's day and cost the U.S. economy $588 billion a year [download the full report]
- Nearly one-third of 14- to 21-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 developed countries on an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development test of problem-solving skills related to analytic reasoning.
- Nearly 60% of 15-year-olds in the U.S. score at or below the most basic level of problem solving, such as using single sources of information to solve a simple challenge such as planning a route on a map.
- Only 30% of college graduates can understand a simple document such as a food label, down from 40% a decade ago, and nearly 57% of Americans don't read a single book a year.
Jackson doesn't blame technology for all our ills, but she does say that these tools are powerful and we need to understand how they are affecting us. Take virtual experiences, for instance. We've become so used to them-whether through virtual meetings or experiences in virtual lands such as Second Life-that to some people these experiences are as real as physical ones, and in some cases preferable. We may have thousands of "relationships" with people through networking groups, but have little face-to-face time to spend with friends...that is if we have them. According to Jackson, one-quarter of Americans say they have "no close confidante," more than double the number 20 years ago. The larger the network of contacts you have, the more likely it is that you will have less actual contact with them.
Some of the family studies that Jackson cited revealed shocking truths. Elinor Ochs, a linguistic anthropologist, MacArthur fellow, and head of UCLA's Center on the Everyday Lives of Families, has become fascinated by what happens at the end of the day when families are reunited. Greetings are rituals and a way of acknowledging one another's presence. Yet in Ochs' studies, wives stopped what they were doing to welcome a returning spouse just a little more than a third of the time. Husbands were more likely to greet wives-about half offered a positive greeting. And kids, well they rarely looked up to acknowledge their fathers. Jackson theorizes that because we check-in with each other virtually during the day, the act of returning home to a place becomes "devoid of meaning." The UCLA study discovered that on weekdays, the parents and at least one child came together in a room just 16%of their time at home. What does that portend about family relations and our ability to form deep bonds in the future with friends, family and co-workers?
Our ability to pay attention at work is not much better. Bombarded by stimuli all day long, we must continually shift from one task to another, which has some "switch costs" associated with it. Jackson quotes David Meyer, a multitasking expert who heads up the Brain, Cognition, and Action Lab at the University of Michigan about these costs: "Training can help overcome some of the inefficiencies by giving you more optimal strategies for multitasking, but except in rare circumstances, you can train until you're blue in the face and you'd never be as good as if you just focused on one thing at a time."
Okay, so that's the true bottom line. Doing one thing at a time allows you to do your best, but how many people in today's workplace have that luxury? "In the name of efficiency," says Jackson, "we are diluting some of the essential qualities that make us human."
Next: What To Do?
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