Rebuilding attention span
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A warm welcome to phlogosphere newcomer christyotwisty[1]! Congrats on taking
the plunge underground, I hope you enjoy yourself here.
In their first entry, christyotwisty lists "rebuilding attention span" as a
"current quest". This is something I can definitely relate to. Just for the
past, maybe, year or so, I have increasingly often found myself feeling like I
have slipped into multi-hour periods of near total lack of attention span. This
hasn't happened all of a sudden, I feel like it is the culmination of a process
that has been slowly building.
For the majority of my life I have had not even the slightest hint that I have
anything resembling a genuine attention deficit disorder. I made it through
high school and university easily without any trouble focussing on things for
hours at a time.
I can't help but shake the suspicion that computers and the internet have
something to do with this. I remember being in high school the first time that
the idea that this newfangled information age thing might be corrupting the
minds of the youth, and being a little proto-hacker I vehemently spat on the
idea and dismissed it as the delusions of old people who didn't get it. I
realise now that the possibility certainly cannot be dismissed out of hand.
The thing is that while I have always spent a lot of time online and been hugely
invested in the net, the frequency and immediacy of my internet usage has
steadily increased. In the beginning I was on dialup and so only got a few
hours of use each night. Then ADSL came along and I was online all the time in
principle, but only when sitting in front of a big hulking tower on a desk.
Then a laptop, and then wifi, and now smart phones. This rise in connectivity
correlates very well in time with my perceptions of my ability to focus on
things deteriorating.
But, then, again, the rise in connectivity also correlateds, of course, with me
getting older, and with transitioning from being "twenty something" to "thirty
something". Maybe this is a natural occurrence, or maybe there is a natural
decay happening at the same time, making it worse, I dunno.
If I had to guess, and I really am just speculating here, I would point the
finger at things like tabbed browsers and also terminal multiplexers like
screen/tmux as playing a pretty big role in this. Not only am I always either
in front or within very quick reach of an online computer these days, but it's
very easy for me to have 100 things on the go at once on that computer. When I
get in the zone and am multitasking smoothly and swapping between logically
separated terminals at just the right times, these tools feel great. But in the
increasingly frequent times when I'm not in the zone, I am flitting between tabs
and terminals at random like a moth. I will be moving from terminal to terminal
looking for the one I need to complete one task, and along the way I'll bump
across something I left unfinished from earlier and context switch to that,
immediately forgetting what I was originally looking for, and just flail about
in that way for a few hours without making solid progress toward any one goal.
Because I know that this is not some inherent flaw in my mind but something that
I have slipped into gradually over the years, I believe the process is
reversible and if I make it a "quest" like christyotwisty I should be able to
rebuild my attention span to what it was. I guess I need to do some research
and come up with some kind of plan on this front. Hopefully the relevant
browser tabs don't disappear amongst the sea of other stuff...
[1]
gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/christyotwisty
