Distractions In A Busy, Busy World (Part 1)

Everyone, at one time or another, is guilty of being distracted. Don't you think so?

The statement that I made above is pretty harsh, I have to admit -- it speaks to me in my own face often (yes, I am guilty of being so distracted, and it got to me to the point that I'm writing an entire blog post about it now. Read on...) -- but I think that we can't really run away from distractions. They just seem to be haunting us and sapping away on every second of productive time that we have in a day.

I've found myself wondering, why do we get distracted so easily? It just seems to be always lurking at the back door waiting to jump in and tackle the unwary, unfocused person...

A distraction is, according to the Wikipedia article about it, the divided attention of an individual or group from the chosen object of attention onto the source of distraction. According to the same article, distraction is caused by one or all of the following reasons: the lack of ability to pay attention; lack of interest in the object of attention; or the great intensity, novelty or attractiveness of something other than the object of attention.

Now, I'm going to elaborate on the three reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph.

• The lack of ability to pay attention: This, in my honest opinion, is natural for some folks. Just like how some folks have the natural ability to pay undivided attention or focus on whatever they're doing, be it work, conversation, or even having fun, some folks have the opposite quality, which is that they need a constant change of activity and tend to get restless over repetitious, long or routine tasks. Certain physical conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) further aggravate the inability to focus on one thing at a time. (For more details on ADHD, click here.)
• The lack of interest in the object of attention: I would describe it as the lack of interest in the object or task that we are supposed to be paying attention to, due to the importance of the task for our personal development. Career, studies, and spending time with people are examples of tasks that fall into this 'important' category. However, as undeniably important as they are, these tasks are the ones that usually require long term planning and a lot of diligence and perseverance to accomplish, even when the goals are immediate i.e studying for your next major exam, and given the perceived unpleasant nature of important tasks in the here and now, we easily take the bait to do more unimportant tasks that provide instant gratification (important tasks tend to have long-term rewards as opposed to short-term pleasure). Which brings me to my next point...
• The great intensity, novelty or attractiveness of something other than the object of attention: As I said in the previous point, certain other tasks provide more pleasure than others, and as such we tend to choose the pleasurable task over the not-so-pleasurable ones. How do we define 'pleasurable' in context? I think that 'pleasurable' here refers to how taxing is a task to the mind, or how much work do we have to do on our part to get a certain task done, i.e watching television only requires that we take in some entertainment to tickle our fancies whereas when writing an article, the writer's mind has to work on how to properly structure sentences to make a coherent and thought-provoking article. 

Looking at the amount of information overload and 'to-do's in our world today, it's no wonder that it's super hard to focus! The idea that multi-tasking is an essential skill in today's world is still a subject of debate today; there are those that say the multi-tasking is really another form of distraction, and that technology has made it all the more obvious. 

In today's world, people are getting increasingly distracted. According to a source cited in this ABC news online article dated 27/5/2005: 

A study of office workers found that they were interrupted, on average, once every 10 and a half minutes. And then it takes them 23 minutes to get back to their original task.

Another more recent (and elaborate) example, this time among students, from United Press International Online (2/5/2011): 

Teens may argue they can focus on homework with the TV on, but U.S. researchers confirm what parents have long suspected, multitasking is distracting.

Professors S. Adam Brasel and James Gips of Boston College say study participants told researchers they only looked at the computer during TV commercials, or that they thought they were watching TV while Web pages were loaded.

However, the study finds people on average switched their eyes back and forth between TV and computer 120 times in 27.5 minutes -- or nearly once every 14 seconds.

How distracted can we get, really?

In today's post, I elaborated briefly on the reasons, in my opinion, on why we get distracted so easily. In Part 2 of this post, I'm going to research and dig deep on what you and I can do to be more focused on the important tasks in life and lessening distractions. In Part 3, I'm going to share about my ongoing personal battle with distractions right now, and the ways that I'm experimenting to overcome them.


P.S: Breaking my blog post into parts is actually one of my methods to be a not-so-distracted writer -- as with business all around me (or rather, my own inability to prioritize the stuff I need to do) new ideas are hard to come by...


Stay tuned. Meanwhile, I shall hit the books for my mid-year exams...


Image taken from here.