Newsweek had a great article last week that was questioning the merit of letting President Obama keep his Blackberry:
“So while legions of BlackBerry fans cheer Obama’s success in keeping his, insisting it makes users more productive and connected, experts in cognitive psychology and in human-machine interactions who study pop-ups, e-mail alerts, calendar reminders and instant messaging—the most intrusive and ubiquitous pre-BlackBerry technologies—have two things to say: distraction overload, and continuous partial attention. For whatever the virtues of a handheld, there is no question that, depending how you use it, you risk never focusing exclusively on any thought or perception for long and never being able to work straight through to completion on anything. That’s OK for tasks you can handle with half your cerebral lobes tied behind your back. It’s less fine when the task is, say, watching for track signals while operating a train.”
I know that my iPhone has changed the way I think. There is no question that the iPhone is the most incredible piece of technology I have owned. While I accomplish alot especially when I am traveling, I feel I am always distracted. It is hard to be present. I feel no matter where I am or what I am doing, I constantly have to see if there is something else I need to be redoing. I am constantly asking myself, do I need to be reprioritizing right now? Even as I write this blog post, I am tempted to check incoming email messages and Twitter alerts.
(I will be right back :-)
(I am back.)
Scientists at Microsoft Research and the University of Illinois found in 2007 that it takes “15 minutes to productively resume a challenging task when they are interrupted even by something as innocuous as an e-mail alert”. This multi-tasking does hurt my creativity. I have a fear of doing nothing- of not being productive. There is always something else to do or another thing to learn or someone new to connect with!
As Newsweek says, “That “nothing” is what our pre-BlackBerry forebears called daydreaming, which is a propitious mental state for creativity, insight and problem solving. Truly novel solutions and ideas emerge when the brain brings together unrelated facts and thoughts. That is hard to achieve when you are attacking the problem head on.”
The only way I have written 2 books (and a third on the way) and write articles every week is to turn off all the distractions. When I need to I turn on specific mood music that puts me a place I can focus and make that creative stuff happen. Many times, that time feels more satisfying then the loads of stuff I can get done by multi-tasking.
I don’t know about you, but I get more enjoyment out of focusing on one thing at a time. But don’t be fooled- you’d still have to kill me to get take my iPhone from me!
