Ever have one of those days at work in which you know you’ve been busy all day, but you can’t quite point to just what you’ve accomplished? Regulating (not eliminating!) media use may be worth considering.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a heavy user of technology and social media. I’m a big fan of All Things Google, I use an Android-based smartphone for keeping track of both the personal and professional aspects of my life, and I run my course blogs on a WordPress MU installation.
Heck, I even got connected with Team ProfHacker because of my use of social media.
But sometimes, digital media just get in the way. Last weekend, I finally took some time to watch PBS’s recent Frontline feature, Digital Nation. There’s lots to think about there, and the program does a good job of portraying both the benefits and the drawbacks of our near-constant use of technology.
What stood out for me were the downsides (perhaps because the upsides are so obvious to me). In particular, I got to thinking about the points the program made about:
- attention and productivity and
- connecting (or even just the ability to remain quiet and focused)
The second of those is really worth thinking about. I’ve known parents who limit their children’s use of media, not because they think those media are necessarily bad, but because they want to foster their children’s attentiveness to other members of the family. And digital media can certainly be addictive, even for adults. (Case in point: each summer, I usually make an eight-day retreat up in Wisconsin. That should be a time for disconnecting with media and for being quiet and introspective. Could I get through a measly eight days last year without using my phone to check email? Nope. I got twitchy fingers, and just couldn’t resist.)
And it’s not just attentiveness to others and to what’s going on in our own lives that warrants consideration. We also need to be attentive to our work, which brings me back to the first point about productivity. I have indeed had days like the one I’ve described at the top of this post: I’ve been at my computer and busy doing something all day, yet it’s hard to point to any concrete accomplishments at day’s end. When I have a day like that, I can usually point to the culprits: email, Twitter, and the web.
To be fair, it’s sometimes hard to shut out those sorts of distractions. After all, practically speaking, much of my work necessarily involves the use of media. But most of the time, no major disasters are going to happen if I shut down my email or my Twitter feed for a few hours.
Apparently a lot of people get distracted by constant electronic connectivity–especially when trying to write. Meghan Ward offers some suggestions for staying focused and productive (including using MacFreedom or Self Control* to shut down your computer’s networking) at her blog, Writerland, in a post aptly titled “Butt-in-chair stick-to-it-iveness.”
Do you find yourself needing to manage digital distractions in order to remain focused, attentive, and productive? Do you have any strategies to share that you’ve found helpful? Let’s hear about them in the comments.
*Both of these applications are for Mac OSX; suggestions of comparable software for Windows and Linux users would be most welcome.
This post’s CC-licensed image is by Flickr user dougbelshaw.
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