Attention Defficit and Focus

Last night I found this article on the NYTimes site. A bunch of neuroscientists "unplugged" themselves for several days and sailed down the river together as a retreat and as the prelude to further research. (Read article here.)

They didn't come to any particular conclusions, because this wasn't scientifically conducted, but they did have some interesting discussions. Particularly in the realm of being able to focus verses being able to multi-task.

Perhaps I found the article striking because I've only recently come to my own conclusion that multi-tasking makes everything take longer. While writing my morning pages (yes, I still try to practice the Artist's Way), I realized that if I did the pages how you're supposed to, and wrote three pages start to finish without getting up and without letting myself do other tasks, I could finish them in about 30-35 minutes. On days when I took my iPod touch with me and checked email, surfed the web, looked up how to spell words, checked my calendar, sent reminders, I spent 60-80 minutes trying to write three pages. More than double the realized time.

Also, when I got up from those morning pages, I didn't feel particularly focused or purposeful. On days like today, when I didn't let myself check my email repeatedly, and focused only on the page, I stood up and felt ... well ... I felt smarter. Like I had a purpose for the day and I knew what I needed to do and how to do it.

No where in the article does anyone say technology is bad or that we need to fully unplug. What they're discussing is the notion that the format our technology takes is cutting into our mental productivity. It's not email, texting, or instant messaging that's cutting into out attention span, it's the expectation of email.

This was my "aha!" moment.

Whenever I let myself check the iPod for email, etc., my pages took longer to write. Most days I didn't read the email I checked on. Just looked to see what was there. Then looked back again every 15-30 minutes to see what else was there. Often there wasn't new email, but I'd already been derailed from the task of writing morning pages, so I was off on another task for the next few minutes.

I'm now reevaluating how I work on the computer. If I'm on the computer, my email is open. And, right now, like most days, I have 14 web pages open at once. These are things I started to look at but didn't want to read right then, so I left them open to get back to later. They're multi-tasking processes that are spinning their wheels and not accomplishing anything. Frequently I get overwhelmed and frustrated with the amount of pages(tabs) I have open and I have to walk away from the computer or shut them all down. Now I'm thinking that the key might be to not have that many open in the first place. To force myself to finish a task without getting sidetracked into opening a new page in a new tab.

It's also making me more sympathetic to my students. I'm still not amused by shortened attention spans in the classroom, but I'm more sympathetic to the fact that they're no longer being conditioned to sit through long discussions, or have long discussions without allowing technology to interrupt those discussions (lecture, or in-class discussion that they participate in) and rupture their focus.

Thoughts? Suspicions? Anecdotes? How often do you check your email? How often do you check it when you're not at your desk/computer? Do you think it's working, not working? Is there a way around it or is the way through it?

I suppose I should actually write a post this week.

I've spent much of the past four days working on the first ten thousand words of a new novel and successfully avoiding my linguistics class projects. Today I presented on that linguistics project. Don't worry: it went well. I only procrastinate until the last possible minute, not beyond.

Writing this blog post is another means of procrastinating on the written part of the project. Though, by the time this "runs" on Thursday morning I will have finished writing so no need to leave me scornful, mother-like comments about getting back to work. I know, I'm sucking all the fun out of it ;)

Working on the novel has been delightful. It's a "commercial" (i.e. not literary) project but it's happy. I've developed a pattern that has worked extremely well over the past few days. In the afternoon I print out the last half page of the text, then that evening I continue the scene or start the next one by writing it out long hand on the print out page. This gives me a quick edit of the typed text and it also means that the next morning when I go to type it up I have a "running start" for finishing my daily goal of 1000 words.

Someone recently reminded me that Stephen King in his memoir On Writing (which I really need to finish one of these days), says that the first draft of a novel should not take more than three months to write, otherwise the story gets stale in the mind of the author and that staleness translates into the writing. Editing that draft may take forever, but the first one should make it's debut in a heated rush. [I'll leave you to create your own similes and double entendres to follow that statement.]

This week's writing in The Artist's Way deals primarily with shame and anger. Shame that others inflict on us for being creative and "outside the box" of their perceptions and noting the anger we feel as indicative of what is really the matter. No, we don't act on our anger in society (most of the time) but we shouldn't dismiss that anger as irrational or unimportant because there had to be something that triggered it. Just because a hay bale seems to spontaneously combust does not mean that there was not a legitimate reason for the bale to go up in flames.

(Oxidization of wet hay in the center of a tightly bound bale spikes the internal temperature. I did a report on it in eighth grade science.)

I've been thinking about it but, as anger is not socially appropriate to air no matter how wonderfully introspective it is. And I'm really itching to just blab it all. Damn politeness.

Crazymakers

In the second "week" of The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron spends quite a bit of time discussing CRAZYMAKERS, how to identify them, why we have them in our lives, and firmly planting the idea in our minds that we need to rid ourselves of them.

Simply put, CRAZYMAKERS are drama kings and queens. Although that definition may be too simple. They're drama queens combined with school yard bullies; people who cause drama to elevate themselves and keep you subservient and uncreative.

I'm happy to say that I got rid of the last few CRAZYMAKERS in my life near the end of 2007 and that I've let no more back in. That feels pretty damn good.

Morning Pages

Every so often you hear writers, artists, and people in general talk about "morning pages" like it's a term everyone should know like "metaphor" or "poem." To me, the use of the phrase "morning pages" in conversation was a verbal signifier of subscription to a granola zen-like writing-type-thing.

Well, bring out the granola 'cause I'm on the zen boat.

I've been reading Writing Down the Bones for the past ten months. It's snippets of advice and suggestion and anecdote are never longer than a few pages long but I find I can't sit and read through more than two before putting the book down. I needed to up the ante. I needed a new writing regime and I needed it to ask a lot of me. I knew, vaguely, of The Artist's Way because I'd read/skimmed The Writer's Diet while spending long hours in a bookstore last year. The author frequently referred to her first book The Artist's Way and basically said that many of the people who successfully completed her twelve week workshops not only "unblocked" their creative selves, they found what was wrong in their lives -- what was "blocking" their happiness. And, happiness found, they lost a shit-ton of weight.

Whatever! I said and left the store. Wrote a blog about it. And never forgot.

So I've was searching bookstores -- unsuccessfully -- for a copy when it dawned on me to check the university library (there are three copies). And it so happens that the university let me check this book out for three months (no idea why) and it's a 12 week program. Sounds fated, doesn't it?

So here I am one week in. I'm doing it. Writing my morning pages ... not quite as stream of consciousness as they should be. They tend to take me an hour when they should take only 30 minutes, but they still feel good.

I'm hoping that this poor man's therapy will help because I find myself not writing these past few months. No new ideas. No work on old ideas. No editing of half-baked ideas. Sure, I'll open a word document, change a couple of phrasings, get frustrated and close the thing, but that's not helpful, nor is it forward progress.