But Distraction isn’t the title of my . . . read more]]> I shouldn’t kvetch about this, because then I’ll seem like the attention police – a role that I never have wanted to play. Distraction can be a great thing – a creative break, an unconscious impulse to steer in another mental direction, a welcome intrusion from a friend.

But Distraction isn’t the title of my book. And it’s amusing and sometimes frustrating to hear and see how often people make that slip of the tongue… from Distracted to -ion. I wonder if this happens all the time to other authors? Do we celebrate Dickens’ Good Expectations? Did Nabokov shock us with Lola? Is this a peculiarly post-modern symptom of our hurry and overload?

I just stumbled on a particularly amusing example, a humor column by Canadian filmmaker and writer Josh Freed … or was it Greed? … in the Montreal Gazette last fall. The column itself seems to have disappeared from the paper’s website, but I found it in a database by accident. Here’s a slice of it:

In her book Distraction, author Maggie Jackson warns of the shallow modern attention span she calls “Mcthinking.” She says it’s “eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention and stunting society’s…

Uh, sorry what’d she say? I checked my email partway through.

When I saw that a correction ran later in the Gazette, I was thrilled. Someone caught the mistake! But no, the correction alerted readers to the fact that Tolstoy, not Dostoevsky, wroteWar and Peace, another book mentioned in the column. Sigh. Note to the editor: How about giving a helping hand to the living author, the one who’s trying to feed her kids on her writerly profits?

Oh well. Thank you, anyhow, for the shout-out, Josh. As they say, any publicity is good publicity. And I’m glad that you are fighting the good fight against inattention in society.

And on that note, let me give Albert Einstein the last word on distraction. The great thinker once said:

Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.

A Wall Street Journal blog by a commuter who stopped in a busy train station to help an unconscious woman whose plight was ignored by hurried passersby.

A . . . read more]]> A New York Times piece on the toll that frenetic texting is having on teens’ sleep patterns, family lives and times for quiet, connected thinking.

A Wall Street Journal blog by a commuter who stopped in a busy train station to help an unconscious woman whose plight was ignored by hurried passersby.

A Boston Globe column that I’m researching on companies cracking down on texting/cell phoning drivers who madly multitask their way down our highways.

What do these articles and issues have in common? Hurry Sickness, as I’ve written before, corrodes time for daydreaming, for serendipitous togetherness, for undivided attention. If members of our society can’t pause to help a (literally) fallen woman, or make it a priority to look one another in the eye rather nurture a preference for trading Tweets, then we risk far more than stress-related health disorders. We risk a crumbling in the fabric of our society.

In my upcoming May 30 Balancing Acts column on distracting driving, I will recount how a big global engineering firm – populated by on-call, blackberry-addicted employees – banned all phoning and texting while driving, yet found a year later that almost all of its workforce reported no drop in productivity.

Stunning. And yet logical. With a little time management, calls didn’t require instant responses most of the time. (In fact, many hurried calls made while multitasking result in mistakes that take another call to rectify.) As well, the firm’s employees regained something precious – time to mediate on work (and life) problems, rather than simply knee-jerk reacting. Perhaps companies are tightening such policies to avoid litigation in the event of accidents, but whatever their motivation, the outcome may be a helpful nudge to employees to stop and think about the costs of constant lives of hurry. 

Isn’t it amazing that we need a near-death threat before we rethink the quality of our lives?