Maggie Jackson, writer and columnist

My HuffPost blog from the weekend on the pros and cons of new apps that screen out digital distractions for us:

Last night, I got a PTA alert about a software application that allows users to block access to email and websites such as Facebook, while retaining use of the larger web for self-selected time periods. Parents and educators alike are buzzing about this new cure for our distracted, multitasking children.

The name of the app? SelfControl.

Certainly, children are inundated with info-streams, enticing video playgrounds and constant opportunities to visit the virtual party of Facebook. The average 8- to 18-year-old devotes more than seven hours and 38 minutes to entertainment media on a typical day, according to theKaiser Family Foundation. About half of young people use media most or some of the time they’re doing homework.

At the same time, young children and even teens often don’t yet have the cognitive capability to say no to distractions. The parts of their brains — the frontal lobes — that underlie higher-order will and thought continue to develop into their 20s.

Still, will flipping a switch to darken distractions help children to cultivate their powers of self-control? Or is such software just a quick fix for a hurried age? Similar software — “Freedom,” “Concentrate,” “Cold Turkey” — is proliferating. Are we once again leaping to adopt technologies, and then asking questions about how they shape us?

Humans, of course, are tool users. We close doors to create privacy. We reach for Post-It notes and apps to augment memory. Perhaps SelfControl, a free OS X application developed in 2010 by a high school student who is now an undergrad at Columbia University, helps augment our will power by guarding the boundaries that we repeatedly fail to respect ourselves. Sometimes our monkey minds do need external handcuffs.

But we should think more carefully about how we’re using SelfControl and other such apps, and whether we really want to hand them off to young children as ready solutions for taming overload.

At the least, using this app should be accompanied by lots of conversation about the ways we use technology and the subtle value systems that accompany their use. We’ve long equated speed with intelligence in the U.S.; the first hand up in the classroom is considered the smart kid. If we dole out apps such as “focus” or “will power” or maybe someday “empathy” to our children, we are subtly giving them the message that complex, difficult human faculties can be obtained with a click. That’s akin to doling out Ritalin while ignoring the environmental factors that have been shown to influence attention-deficiencies.

Placing these apps center-stage in our battle to tame technology ignores the effort and time needed to nurture self-control — and ultimately diminishes a sense of our own potential. It sounds passe to talk about patience as a “virtue,” as my Depression-era Dad did. But mastering a skill would be a hollow achievement if we could do so in a digital instant.

And as decades of research by Roy Baumeister, Walter Mischel and others show, self-control is a difficult skill that’s worth mastering. Along with intelligence, will power is arguably the most crucial means to a successful school and adult life. And it can be trained.

How do we help children cultivate their willpower? Teach them to respect the integrity of a moment. An interruption has ripple effects, breaking into and potentially clouding ongoing thought, while boosting stress and the risk of error, a wealth of studies show. Heavy multi-taskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” says Stanford’s Clifford Nass.

Set up rules about media use. Sounds basic, but just three in 10 children under 18 are given any parental rules about how much TV and other media they can consume. Helpless parents now feel they cannot shape our increasingly all-embracing media environment. Yet when parents do set limits, children spend less time with media, studies show. Moreover, the very existence of a reasonable rule effectively shows children that the seeming unmanageable in life at least partially can be tamed.

Sure, when my teenage daughters are under deadline, inundated, and over-caffeinated, they might want to download SelfControl for a while. But as my 10th grader said with a laugh when I told her about this application, “Mom, that’s not self-control!”

First one, then another… at the showing of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that I attended last weekend, numerous people walked out of the movie. By the third or fourth exodus, I noticed that viewers were exiting in the film’s most still moments: when the camera lingers on retired spy George Smiley, pensively sitting alone in a pub or when he gives a long, tipsy monologue about his encounter with Russia’s top spymaster. The action had slowed, the hunt had paused – and some voted with their feet.

It’s intriguing that this complex remake of John Le Carre’s classic thriller seems to divide us. Critics, as far as I can see, are mostly laudatory – extolling the cinematography, superb acting, the complex story line. But we, the viewers, seem to love or hate the film; only two of 34 reader-reviewers on The New York Times.com give the movie a score of three out of five. Most rate the movie one/two or a four/five, detesting the film as “slow” and “sluggish” or praising it as  “brilliant” and “engaging”  - and the naysayers outnumber the fans.

Writes marsacademy:  “This film may not find a huge audience, because it has a quality of watchful stillness at its core, which is very unlike what the public expects of a ‘spy film.’ It is not an ‘action’ movie.”

Well put. I think that’s precisely why people were walking out. It’s just a movie of course, and excitement is subjective; your terrifying Ferris Wheel ride could be my aerial nap. But it’s perhaps a mark of our times that people could line up so vehemently in opposite corners over action vs. stillness. Although many of us increasingly battle for calm, we’re still surrounded by – and strongly influenced by – a culture of the quick hit, push-button, the ever-rising tide of busy-ness. After all, adrenaline is as addictive as drugs, studies show.

We may be so shaped by the gadget as appendage, tv as white noise and chit-chat as interaction that it seems stifling to be confronted by stillness. If so, we will surely miss out on the second and third layers of life, or the mysteries that perhaps even our best spymasters may never solve. Hurry past quiet, and we cease to see, as Seamus Heaney once wrote, “allegory hard as a figured shield … polished until its undersurface surfaced, like peat smoke mulling through Byzantium.”

In life as in movies, we have to pause to see what’s beneath the polish.

Is hyper-busyness a form of sloth? It seems beyond paradoxical to consider our efficient, connected, mobile days even remotely… lazy. But both medieval philosophers and early Buddhist practitioners warned of restlessness and busyness as slothful, because amidst such hyper-ness we tend to avoid what’s deep and important.
Think about it. Madly ticking items off our agenda, we easily avoid depth of thought, the discomfort of ambiguity, or the type of thought-experiments that Einstein undertook. Look around – isn’t our addiction to gadgets perhaps a form of avoidance not only to what’s concretely going on around us, but to the deeper bigger issues going on around us?
Taming busyness, we can begin to confront … the blank page. Or we can turn and face our fears, rather than fleeing once again at the sight of them. I’m not advocating navel-gazing, or wallowing in grief or thought without action. But since avoidance of pain, discomfort, difficulty seems to be a specialty of our times, I do believe that a little confrontation with the deeper issues is medicine we could all use.
Here are some thoughts on the subject by the German poet Rilke, as he advises a young protege to be patient with a sad time in his life.
“Do consider whether these great sorrows might not have passed through your very center? Whether much inside you has not been transformed, whether you did not change in some part of your being during those periods of sorrow?”
He goes on to say that moments of sorrow perhaps should be welcomed, “For those are the moments when something new centers into us, something unfamiliar; our feelings grow more out of shy diffidence; everything in us pulls back, a stillness descends and the new that no one knows stands mutely amidst all this.”
Those are words that I wished I’d been able to call forth when, in a recent time of deep sorrow, I was so quickly advised to get on pills or find a shrink. All well-meaning advice. But I couldn’t help thinking that this advice came from a wish to muffle or abolish my pain, rather than an acceptance of my right to listen within, and hear out my pain, and grow stronger as a result.
Sometimes when others are grieving, the best thing we can do is accept their right to be in pain. Instead of saying so quickly, “Get over it. Move on. Get fixed.”

Just got back from the Business Marketing Association’s annual conference in Chicago, where I spoke on a general session panel entitled “The @Work State of Mind.” Rick Segal, president of the ad firm GyroHSR, moderated.

The boundaries between home and work are gone – that’s not news. But we’re still dealing with the fallout. At BMA, I noted that the division between these spheres was a short-lived Industrial Age experiment. Remember, the weekend and the vacation are recent (and fading) inventions.

But that doesn’t mean that we’re returning to an agrarian past. In the pre-Industrial past, the work-life blend stemmed from a restriction of human experience. People were rooted, and hewn to biological or cultural time flows. Now, work-life integration is due to an expansion of experience – a collapse of distance and a rush past the shackles of the clock. We’re free-floaters, for both better and worse.

We’re in constant “on” mode, a tempo that is inspiring and exhausting. Fellow panelist Eduardo Conrado, chief marketing officer at Motorola Solutions, told of being home, yet “snacking” on information all the time. A new study reports that 30 percent of mobile workers wake up at night to check email. (A blurring of sleep and wake?)

We’re having trouble finding the time and resources to pay attention deeply. Dalton Conley of NYU pointed out research showing that multitasking affects memory. When we juggle while trying to learn, we can’t recall the newly learned information deeply, and so cannot transfer this shallow learning to new situations. The opportunity is squandered.

Three-quarters of workers say they don’t have enough time with their children, even while studies show that parental time spent on childcare is at record highs. Why the disconnect? Multitasking. People feel time-starved, because they’re with their children, yet mentally away. As panelist Johnna Torsone, HR director at Pitney Bowes, pointed out, we have wonderful new ways to connect; she skypes with her West Coast grandson. But we can’t nurture deep relations without face time, and without at least sometimes preserving what I call the integrity of the moment. It’s essential to our humanity.

The implications for marketers? First, nurture ways to step in and out of the flow. Being immersed, hurried, interrupted and reactive is antithetical to deep thought and relations – and informed decision-making. Second, highlight stories. Narrative is more important than ever as essential form of meaning-making in a complex society. It’s a terra firma in this free-floating world. As Jerome Bruner notes, stories are mankind’s way of  wresting meaning from surprise – from the times when something went awry.

Gyro kindly bought 100 copies of Distracted as a giveaway. As I signed them, people expressed their concern again and again for their children’s future. A world without deep focus is untenable, and we know it.

Information overload is a problem that’s hard to pick apart. Haven’t we been deluged with information for hundreds of years? How can we turn down the data spigot without losing out on opportunities? Is anybody thinking creatively on this front?

A new book, Overload! How Too Much Information if Hazardous to Your Organization, by Jonathan Spira valiantly grapples with these issues. Spira is chief executive of the research firm Basex, and he’s been a passionate crusader against such deluge through his surveys and writings. Sometimes, Spira’s book itself slips into overload mode; a reader doesn’t need quite so much convincing that the problem is real. But get past the fretting and the many barometers of overload, and the book has numerous eye-opening moments – and practical suggestions.

Spira is at his best, for instance, when tackling email. He was one of the first to see its dangers. Like rabbits overrunning Australia, email breeds astronomically, especially through thoughtless “reply all” responses and equally thoughtless over-lengthy content. Spira fights back by offering a brief preface of his message at the top of an email, a tactic called “Bottom Line Up Front” that Spira borrowed from a former military officer. (Col. Peter Marksteiner – Does Twitter Match The Mission?) Such small, elegant solutions are crucial for handling overload.

It seems to me that the issue overall boils down to a two-part challenge.

First, quality and quantity.  In our daily life, humans endlessly endeavor to parse out the relevant from volumes of information hitting us physically and cognitively. Overload becomes an issue when the pace and volume of data exceeds our biological ability to sift and sort it. The result? Stress, paralyzed decision-making, and shallow thought, as Spira notes.

Consider online searching – a time when the human should take charge, sculpting a question designed to pull relevant data from the machine. Instead, people don’t take the time to formulate a careful query, and so are deluged with trivia. Their mistake, it seems to me, is to hope that the machine will do all the thinking.Instead, we need the tenacity to get past the first page of mostly paid results and the first phase of frustration and confusion endemic to research. We need to ask ourselves, are we thinking and reflecting throughout our data-driven day?

Spira’s research has found that knowledge workers spend just 5 percent of their days on thought and reflection, down from 12 percent of the day in 2008. That slippage is the true key to fighting overload, I believe. That’s why reflection – our most crucial form of perspective-taking – is the subject of my next book.

Stay tuned!

Book Note: What am I reading right now? Lastingness: The Art of Old Age by Nicholas Delbanco, a look at how creators stay productive in their later years.

Months ago, Cali Williams Yost had a wish. In her FastCompany blog, she hoped that Distracted would start an attention movement similar to the new environmentalism sparked by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. And indeed, wherever I speak, people everywhere are asking, ‘where do we start? How do we regain our focus and spark the ‘renaissance of attention’ that you describe in your book?’

Well, that nascent movement just may be starting to pick up speed. Some signs:

 People are talking. There are debates and discussions everywhere about our crisis of distraction. At work, people are drilling down into the roots of overload. At home, parents aren’t smiling much anymore about their kids’ addiction to texting. A new study showing the inefficiencies of multitasking is inspiring heated debate. (See my previous post on the research.) This is important. It’s time to come together and focus on the problem. That’s how solutions get sown.

 People are acting.  A Seattle University communications professor recently held an innovative faculty workshop on the impact of distraction on student life. Professors everywhere are frustrated by a chronic lack of attention in the classroom. But organizer Mara Adelman coaxed the discussion beyond griping and finger-wagging.

At the workshop, faculty talked about setting up clear, firm rules on tech use in class and holding kids accountable – no attention, no recommendation. But faculty also did a lot of soul-searching, according to the wonderful website that Adelman set up to keep the momentum of the event going. They talked about collectively working through “technoquette” issues, role modeling focus in their lives, and reminding one another and students how opportunities for connection and conversation are lost amidst epidemic distraction. One faculty member wrote later, “I used to complain about distraction but never spent time to analyze this problem. This workshop made me sit down and find ways to control distraction in my personal life and in the classroom.”

This is exciting, and it’s not a one-off example. I’ve heard of others crafting training events based on my book and other resources. Add to this the uptick in both state and employer bans on driving distracted, and I see the makings of a 360-degree movement.

Write to me if you have ideas on how to move the process forward!

PS – Check out this great blog post by Andrea Saveri, one of my favorite thinkers, on multitasking and the often overly simplistic discussions that erupt when we debate about the impact of technology on our lives. Hear, hear!

It’s late, and I’m flying to the Midwest tomorrow, so this will be short. But I want to chime in a bit on a new, small but important research study out of Stanford this week. There are already a number of media outlets writing about the study, which in a nutshell indicates that heavy multitaskers aren’t doing their juggling all that well. This is important. While we’ve seen a tremendous body of research showing that most multitasking is inefficient and error-prone, somehow there’s always been an assumption by many that heavy multitaskers can “do it” well. And that doesn’t appear to be true. Practice does help a little. For instance, air traffic controllers can scan a screen and juggle flights better than laypeople. But heavy multitasking doesn’t help boost focus or thinking skills, at least according to this study published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by veteran researcher Clifford Nass and colleagues.

When asked to do simple task-switching in a lab setting, students who were heavy media multitaskers were constantly distracted by irrelevant data, and even did a lousy job of remembering what they were supposed to be doing. Wow. “They couldn’t help thinking about the task they weren’t doing,” said researcher Eyal Ophir in a Stanford press release. ”The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can’t keep things separate in their minds.”

Sure, lab experiments aren’t the end of the story. But the study – which I’ve read in the original – clearly shows that heavy multitaskers are deficient in voluntary cognitive control while trying to perform simple task-switching. In other words, they are poor at controlling their focus, and “suckers for irrelevancy,” as Clifford Nass attests. That’s a disturbing finding, whatever cognitive benefits we may later discover in multitasking.

Certainly, attention is so all-encompassing and so crucial to our survival that we’re often not aware, so to speak, of how much information we’re processing in our environment and within what William James called our “stream of consciousness.” We are in many senses born interrupt-driven; to survive we have to be ever-alert to new stimuli in our environment. (And work by Jonathan Schooler indicates that mind-wandering may be good for creativity.) But at the same time, effortful attention, along with working memory, are keys to pursuing our goals. If we can’t sort out the irrelevant in a simple brief lab task, chances are we’re not doing such a great job in the wider, complex world. (And given the plasticity of our brains, it’s not unimaginable that heavy multitasking does shape and even undermine our ability to focus deeply, evaluate and assess the information around us.)

 Drinking from the fire hose of media today may have its benefits, just as videogaming has been found to boost some types of visual attention. But let’s keep the big picture in mind. If we sacrifice cognitive control in the name of high-speed, reactive, distracted living, then the costs of multitasking will be steep indeed.

      “Are you listening?” cries the father character in Distracted, a play I saw last weekend in New York. “Name one friend of ours who really listens,” he demands of his wife.

      This fast-paced and often funny play focuses on a couple who are trying to decide whether to medicate their son, who’s been diagnosed with ADD. The play resembles a tv sitcom, with plentiful one-liners, quick-change staging and one-dimensional characters. There is the baffled mom wanting to do the right thing for her son; an angry, hyper dad who sees his son as just another rambunctious boy; an exhausted teacher; prescription-happy shrink, and on and on.

       But there are poignant moments, especially when the play raises questions that transcend the narrow issue of treatments and diagnoses. In these moments, the audience is brought face to face with the deeper costs of our scattershot focus and punctured togetherness. Then, we begin to see the mini-tragedies of mutual inattention that we experience and set in motion each day.

      The dad, for instance, is always hopping up and down, interrupting his wife, checking his pda and storming out of meetings with specialists. So it’s particularly powerful when he suddenly begins his lamentation about listening. Few of the characters truly listen to one another. They’re too busy pursing their own agendas. (How fitting that I sat in front of two couples who chatted to one another audibly throughout the play.)

     Like many people, I noticed a seeming decline in mutual listening in our society, but until I wrote about this skill in my Globe column, I underestimated its importance and complexity. Listening demands practice, patience and critical thinking. It is a learned skill, and a building block of good relations. “Listening is really the skill of being in the conversation, rather than being in your own conversation,” says Jim Bolton, who does corporate training in listening.

      We also can’t really consider how we listen, without thinking about our soundscapes. A new inter-disciplinary field of aural architecture has grown out of early acoustical engineering work. Barry Blesser and others in the field explore the aural aspects of physical spaces, including how they affect relationships. For example, consider how the hushed quiet of a church affects people’s interactions within. Or how television, jet engines and loudspeaker announcements affect the social environment of an airport. Soundscapes aren’t just a matter of volume control, just as listening isn’t simply an act of hearing.

     At the end of the play Distracted, the mom has an epiphany: if her son has an attention-deficit, perhaps he needs more of her attention.  In the closing scene, she and her husband quietly watch as her son dances to his favorite music. Playwright Lisa Loomer told the New York Times that she thought that this scene may be misinterpreted. But I think she got it right. Fractured, frazzled, absent attention is a modern syndrome that we can’t afford to ignore. 

Postscript: After finishing this post, a kind soul sent me a Guardian UK blogger’s piece defending her right to twitter at the theater. Sending Tweets during a show may be rude to the actors and audience, writes Ruth Jamieson, but “not twittering is so rude” to her followers. “They are my priority,” she writes. Remember neuroscientist Susan Greenfield’s controversial remarks about how social networking tools may be infantilizing us – promoting instant-gratification, impulsivity, short attention spans? 

No one likes to be called a baby, whether they are age five or 35. That’s one reason why recent comments by British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield that today’s technologies may be “infantilizing the brain” are inspiring heated debate – and plentiful misunderstanding. I don’t agree with all that she said about virtual social relations, but she’s right to raise these fears. Only through well-reasoned public discussion and careful research can we begin to understand the impact of digital life on our social relations and on our cognition. Recently, I was asked by the Neuronarrative blog to comment on the brouhaha:

What did she say? In a statement to the House of Lords and in interviews, Lady Greenfield first pointed out that our environment shapes our highly plastic brains, and so it’s plausible that long hours online can affect us. She’s right. “Background” television is linked to attention-deficient symptoms in toddlers. High stress impedes medical students’ mental flexibility. I agree that “living in two dimensions,” as she puts it, will affect us.

As a result of video games and Facebooking, are we acting like babies, living for the moment, developing shorter attention spans? Again, she’s right to worry. Facebook and video games aren’t passive. Yet much of digital life is reactive. We settle for push-button googled answers, immerse ourselves in “do-over” alternate realities, spend our days racing to keep up with Twitter, email and IM. This way of life doesn’t promote vision, planning, long-term strategizing, tenacity – skills sorely needed in this era.

Consider this issue as an imbalance of attention. Humans need to stay tuned to their environment in order to survive. We actually get a little adrenaline jolt from new stimuli. But humans need to pursue their goals, whether that means locating dinner or hunting for a new job. By this measure, our digital selves may be our lower-order selves. As ADHD researcher Russell Barkley points out, people with the condition pursue immediate gratification, have trouble controlling themselves and are “more under the control of external events than of mental representations about time and the future.” He writes that ADHD is a disorder of “attention to the future and what one needs to do to prepare for its arrival.” Today, as we skitter across our days, jumping to respond to every beep and ping and ever-craving the new, are we doing a good job preparing for the future?

Finally, Lady Greenfield spoke about two types of social diffusion prevalent in digital living. First, she correctly points out that today’s fertile virtual connectivity has a dark side: it’s difficult to go deeply when one is juggling ever-more relationships. This is both common sense, and backed up by research showing that as social networks expand, visits and telephone calls drop, while email rises. Second, Lady Greenfield observed how virtuality distances us from the “messiness” and “unpredictability” of face-to-face conversations. In other words, digital communications can weaken the very fabric of social ties. As I wrote in my book Distracted, an increasingly virtual world risks downgrading the rich, complex synchronicity of human relations to paper-thin shadow play.

If it weren’t for the Net, I likely wouldn’t have found out about Lady Greenfield’s comments, nor been able to respond to them in this way. Yet going forward, we need to rediscover the value of digital gadgets as tools, rather than elevating them to social and cognitive panacea. Lady Greenfield is right: we need to grow up and take a more mature approach to our tech tools.

Addendum: SharpBrains.com recently published part two of my interview with them.