Take a moment and listen to your deepest, most secret heart: Is it telling you that you text too much?
Okay… maybe that’s just me. I have a very contentious relationship with texting, and according to this story in The New York Times, my discomfort makes sense. This piece is all about the potentially negative effects of texting on teenagers—who are averaging over 2,200 texts per month (!)—but I’ve experienced quite a few of the phenomena that this story describes.
This quote from MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle hits me where I live:
As for peace and quiet, she said, “if something next to you is vibrating every couple of minutes, it makes it very difficult to be in that state of mind.
“If you’re being deluged by constant communication, the pressure to answer immediately is quite high,†she added. “So if you’re in the middle of a thought, forget it.â€
Amen, sister! Like many of you, my workday (and a large swath of my personal time) is dominated by distraction-making devices. They deliver text messages, yes, but also IMs and e-mail and voicemails and on and on and on.
Often, this barrage of distractions makes me anxious. I feel assaulted by information, and I feel like I’m losing control of my time. And god help me if I leave these channels open while I’m trying to write something thougtful. Even in the process of writing this post, I’ve had to disable my Gmail notifier, beacuse the damn thing kept interrupting me every five seconds to let me know that I’d received yet another press release about some no-budget solo show in Brooklyn that celebrates somebody’s beautiful pain.
According to this recent cover story in New York magazine, distractions like this can throw us off course for up to twenty-five minutes. No wonder I’m shocked at how quickly I finish a story when I turn everything off. I’m saving hours.
But as the New York piece astutely states, “the virtual horse has already left the digital barn.” We are irrevocably in an age of constant information, and now our task is to handle that information (and its conduits) wisely.
I mean, I’m certainly not an alarmist who thinks the internet or texting or the iPhone signals doom for all humanity. I run a website, for god’s sake. I embrace the digital age for all its many glories.
My concern isn’t about accepting or rejecting this era of “partial attention.” It’s about making sure that the distractors don’t control me.
As author and researcher Winifred Gallagher says in New York:
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 every time you get an instant message, that’s not the machine’s fault. That’s your fault.â€
Which leads me to ask: Do you feel yourself being whittled down by electronic distractions? And if so, how do you deal with them?
I’ve only started thinking about this in the last few days, so my strategies are still forming, but here are a few
- For one, there’s The Critical Condition. This website exists to foster conversation, not hurl factoids at your face. Taking the time to really think through an essay I’m posting, or to consider the engaging comments you guys leave every day, makes me feel calmer and more focused.
- Then there’s reading. I’ve been devouring books recently—I’ve read six in the last five weeks, which is a huge number for me. And there’s something so… centering… about reading a book. No ads flashing on the sides of the pages. No opportunity to look in the margin and see if I’ve gotten a new e-mail. Instead, I get to fall into a single narrative and wallow around. After devoting my mental attention to a single object like a novel, I feel noticeably refreshed.
- Finally, I’ve been making more of an effort to leave my phone at home when I’m out with friends, or turn it off when my boyfriend and I are having alone time. It’s awfully nourishing to give my full attention to a human being instead of a machine.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Alison // May 27, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Mark,
I totally agree–especially about reading. Now when I sit down to read for even half an hour it feels like I’ve been to a spa or something. Or taken a nap. It’s good advice. It reminds us we can 2) focus for more than five minutes and b) escape while we’re doing it. It’s bananas!
Al
2 Bunting // May 27, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Although I’m aware of what’s happening, I can’t seem to stop email from expanding to fill up every crevice in my day. Between email, the phone, checking various photo streams/comments for work, I can feel my focus splintering, and confining email to certain times of day has worked for me in the past. But I always fall off the wagon.
3 Claire // May 27, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I definitely agree we need to spend less time with our cyber “friends” and more with the people next to us. I’ve had an iPhone for nearly a year & love the freedom to get away from the computer, but is it really giving me more “freedom” or is it just keeping me connected in places where I used to find a break from the internet. I pledge to leave my phone on silence in my office when I’m not working and spend that email, twitter, facebook checking energy on my family and friends IRL.
4 David Dillard-Wright // May 27, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Hi Mark (and other distractees)! I tried to unplug my work computer from the internet so that I could write. I thought that this would be a simple fix to the distraction. For some reason, it caused my computer to go berserk, and I had to call a tech guy to fix it. So I felt like I had no choice but to tolerate the constant stream of (mostly pointless) emails, etc. The only strategy that has worked for me is to set small goals during the day and try to achieve them. After accomplishing some of these goals, I feel like it doesn’t matter if I get distracted.
5 Jthan // May 27, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Last sunday the neighbours and I were out on their boat enjoying the weather and drinking beer. Then the texting started in. I looked at my phone, turned it off, and went back to my icy beer and warm sunshine. The text can (and should) take a back seat to there here and now.
A family member who is a surgeon used to have to carry a pager in case of emergencies, and that damned device ruined a lot of fun times. Maybe that’s why I kind of resent my cell phone instead of embrace it.
6 Wendy // May 28, 2009 at 10:20 am
I use this thing called Freedom which is a little Mac app that disables your internet for a set period of time (and you have to restart the computer to override it). I didn’t expect it to be much different from just turning off the wi-fi, but somehow it is, and I love it. I use it for writing, when I HAVE to be on the computer, but I also like it for times when I need to read or go through a manuscript and want to resist that itch to check my email. It lets you go offline for up to 8 hours at a time, and you can set it for smaller intervals to make online and offline time more structured.
Interestingly, now that I’ve started using it, I’m finding that I don’t always need to actually set it when I need to get some task done… something about just having it has helped me let go of that feeling of needing to be constantly connected.
7 KarenG // May 28, 2009 at 8:06 pm
OK, first of all, I am totes guilty of all this distraction stuff and have to check the damn crackberry all the time. But I have now turned my cell phone on silent–ALL the time–because about a year ago just hearing the ring would stress me out. If it’s important, I’ll get the voice mail.
I had a client in for a facial once who REFUSED to turn off her blackberry and actually held onto it in the facial bed and would type away at it during the facial! It was like I was first hand experiencing an addiction. She refused to let the damn thing go b.c she was afraid of missing something. Needless to say, I refused to book her again. Part of having a treatment is to de-stress and there ain’t none of that happening if you are tethered to your text messages.
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