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.

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.

We’ve all heard of the distracted pilots who overshot the Minneapolis airport. But did you know that medical errors due to distraction place many people in danger every day?

A reader sent me a fascinating dispatch from the medical world on a series of San Francisco-area programs to reduce medical errors while nurses are dispensing medications. Nurses reduced their errors nearly 90 percent at nine Bay-area hospitals over the past year, and a key to the effort lay in new techniques to reduce distractions.

You can imagine what happens. Hospitals are busy places, with the level of care growing more complex by the day. A nurse dispensing medicine at bedside gets interrupted, mixes up one medicine for another, and the results can be fatal. Errors in administering medicine cause 400,000 preventable injuries in hospitals and $3.5 billion in extra medical costs annually, according to the Institute of Medicine.

The focus on distractions at Kaiser South San Francisco Medical Center began with orange vests – similar to those construction workers wear, according to an article in Nursezone, an online news site for the field. Quality-control nurses thought that wearing the vests as a kind of walking “do not disturb” sign could reduce interruptions during pill dispensing.

At first, floor nurses balked, seeing the vests as “cheesy” and “demeaning.” But first results showed that two units cut their errors in half in just four or five months simply by using the vests and educating nurses about reducing distractions.

The word spread throughout the hospital and across the Kaiser system, and a test of nine hospitals reduced medical dispensing distractions about 88 percent in the past year. The larger program includes many more safety steps from checking patient identity twice to turning up the lights and – my particular favorite – turning down the television. (I recall taking my then-two daughter to the dentist for the first time and watching amazed as the hygienist tried to give her a first brushing lesson with the tv blaring. Since then, I’ve always switch off the tv when a dentist or assistant come in the room.)

As a result of the intervention, giving medicines is “a more focused process,” says Suzi Kim, RN, BSN, and a staff nurse at Kaiser West Los Angeles hospital. Without interruptions, “we can think clearly.”

And if hospital staff can think clearly, perhaps they can do more to see and treat the whole human being. I hope so. As important as these anti-distraction programs are, procedures shouldn’t be the end of the story. While medical folks need to focus to do their work correctly and to problem-solve, they also need to restore focus to their interaction with the patient.

That’s the topic of my next blog, which will run tomorrow.

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.

We’re so busy, so “productive,” ticking off items off our agendas, clicking through over-stuffed in-boxes. But in what sense are we productive ? Could it be that we are racing ahead in the most shallow senses of the word?

 This is a particularly timely question as we reap the fall-out from an era of unprecedented, and often unthinking abundance. By unthinking, I mean activity without thought to consequence, to ourselves and others. Activity without perspective, especially on the future. Isn’t that the core of what’s been happening in terms of the environment, crimes like Madoff’s, and even the disintegration of deep family rhythms and rituals?

A short but important column in the U.K.’s Guardian newpaper this past weekend drives to the heart of this question of the cult of busyness.

“Telling ourselves we’re hugely stressed makes us feel important, in demand, even energised; it also gives us permission to avoid confronting deeper issues,” writes Oliver Burkeman.

 He writes, “… busyness is the perfect excuse: if you’re convinced that you’re overstretched and overwhelmed, you’re spared the terrifying prospect of actually doing the things, and making the changes, that you want – or say that you want, since busyness spares you from examining that question, too.”

  Notice the word “terrifying.” Burkeman’s comments remind me of a man I met at a futurist conference who spoke glowingly of his new cell phone that worked globally. (This was a while back.) He told the audience, “Now, I never have to be alone.”

  Yes, it’s often terrifying to be alone with oneself. And it’s terrifying to take responsibility for ourselves – and for the care and keeping of our world.

   Addendum: A site called Sharp Brains and a blog called Neuronarrative both have posted email-interviews with me about Distracted. In both cases, the questions were intriguing.