A college professor who teaches film tells me he's reading a bi ography of one of his heroes, the legendary French director Fran c;:ois Truffaut. But, he finds, "I can't read more than two pages at a stretch. I get this overwhelming urge to go online and see if I have a new email. I think I'm losing my ability to sustain concentration on anything serious."
The inability to resist checking email or Facebook rather than focus on the person talking to us leads to what the sociologist Erv ing Coffman, a masterly observer of social interaction, called an "away," a gesture that tells another person "I'm not interested" in what's going on here and now.
At the third All Things D(igital) conference back in 2005, confer
ence hosts unplugged the Wi-Fi in the main ballroom because of the glow from laptop screens, indicating that those in the audience were not glued to the action onstage. They were away, in a state, as one participant put it, of "continuous partial attention," a mental blurriness induced by an overload of information inputs from the speakers, the other people in the room, and what they were doing on their laptops.8 To battle such partial focus today, some Silicon Valley workplaces have banned laptops, mobile phones, and other digital tools during meetings.
After not checking her mobile for a while, a publishing executive confesses she gets "a jangly feeling. You miss that hit you get when there's a text. You know it's not right to check your phone when you're with someone, but it's addictive." So she and her husband have a pact: "When we get home from work we put our phones in a drawer. If it's in front of me I get anxious; I've just got to check it. But now we try to be more present for each other. We talk."
Our focus continually fights distractions, both inner and outer. The question is, What are our distractors costing us? An executive at a financial firm tells me, "When I notice that my mind has been somewhere else during a meeting, I wonder what opportunities I've been missing right here."
A college professor who teaches film tells me he's reading a bi ography of one of his heroes, the legendary French director Fran c;:ois Truffaut. But, he finds, "I can't read more than two pages at a stretch. I get this overwhelming urge to go online and see if I have a new email. I think I'm losing my ability to sustain concentration on anything serious."
The inability to resist checking email or Facebook rather than focus on the person talking to us leads to what the sociologist Erv ing Coffman, a masterly observer of social interaction, called an "away," a gesture that tells another person "I'm not interested" in what's going on here and now.
At the third All Things D(igital) conference back in 2005, confer
ence hosts unplugged the Wi-Fi in the main ballroom because of the glow from laptop screens, indicating that those in the audience were not glued to the action onstage. They were away, in a state, as one participant put it, of "continuous partial attention," a mental blurriness induced by an overload of information inputs from the speakers, the other people in the room, and what they were doing on their laptops.8 To battle such partial focus today, some Silicon Valley workplaces have banned laptops, mobile phones, and other digital tools during meetings.
After not checking her mobile for a while, a publishing executive confesses she gets "a jangly feeling. You miss that hit you get when there's a text. You know it's not right to check your phone when you're with someone, but it's addictive." So she and her husband have a pact: "When we get home from work we put our phones in a drawer. If it's in front of me I get anxious; I've just got to check it. But now we try to be more present for each other. We talk."
Our focus continually fights distractions, both inner and outer. The question is, What are our distractors costing us? An executive at a financial firm tells me, "When I notice that my mind has been somewhere else during a meeting, I wonder what opportunities I've been missing right here."
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