Attention Regulation Disorder
Jun 6th, 2006 by Hugh
Between meetings at work today I was installing Windows XP on a testing machine. Interspersed among all the various reboots and prompts, and during the “Please Wait” messages, I caught up on some of my blogs. I started reading this piece at Lifehacker about the detrimental effects of “attention juggling:”
…productivity gained by technology is also productivity lost by fragmented attention … When people switch gears and move from one process to another, our brains require some amount of time to begin thinking about something else. Forget the amount of time you actually spend browsing on the Internet and reading things you don’t really need to read for your job. Just the fact that you’re switching back and forth means you’re not organizing your time correctly.
See also: Continuous Partial Attention
So much for your integrated approach to work and home life.
This statements seems to support segregation of work, play, ministry, and family. I guess you can simply wear out the “clutch” in your mind to the point of being stuck in neutral.
That’s a great point Kevin. You can only be doing one thing at a time, so you just need to understand your own limitations as to how much wear your “clutch” can endure before your transmission quits altogether.
I think the skill I need to develop is the ability to recognize when it’s better to red-line it for a little bit rather than pay the price of shifting those gears. Right now I’m too sensitive to the RPMs — I guess I have too much attachment to the tranquility that I lose when life goes redline.
To completely beat this analogy to death, it’s a lot like highway vs. city driving. Driving in town you can make lots of stops; on the highway you can make lots of progress. Both can wear you out…
Maybe I just have a stick-shift brain in an automatic world.
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