Is Unitasking A Forgotten Ideal?

Yesterday's New York Times had a lengthy and interesting article about the possible detrimental cognitive effects of hardcore computer usage. Appropriately enough, I read this article on the Internet while I should have been polishing off a report for work. This is a topic that's been floating around for a while, and has picked up recently with Nick Carr's book-length expansion of his widely-circulated 2008 Atlantic article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Although the Times article focuses heavily on a man who appears to have one of the worst possible cases of technological dependence on record, which I think weakened the core argument a bit for me with regard to how widespread the problem is, its publication came at a good time, because this is a matter that's been on my mind quite a bit recently.

There's really no way to phrase this without making it sound banal, but I've always been a huge consumer of written information. When I was a kid, I'd read books by my nightlight when I was supposed to be sleeping. My parents were semi-wise to this and would sometimes come in to check and make sure I wasn't doing this; I'd have to shove the book under my covers or drop it on the floor as noiselessly as possible to avoid getting caught, with varying levels of success depending on how quick on the draw I was. So it's always been very hard for me to avoid reading something new or interesting, even when I really ought to be doing something else instead.

You can guess how this character trait can turn into a weakness when combined with the vast information reserves of the Internet. I've liked Web-surfing from the beginning, but I don't think my life and the Internet really became inextricable until early 2007, when I started consolidating most of my online activity through Google Reader, which not only gave me a one-stop place for checking for updates of sites and blogs I liked, it gave me a quick way to add new stuff to my daily browsing regimen.

I can't imagine life without Google Reader, but it's an immense distraction that's incredibly easy to fall into. A lot of times, I click over to take a quick break from whatever I'm doing and end up reading three or four articles before I even realize how off-track I'm getting. It's not uncommon for me to give myself a 5 minute break that winds up as a 30 minute break because I see a handful of things I can't resist reading.

Whereas the guy in the Times article's computer usage seemed to really affect his productivity and ability to function socially, I don't think that the problem is as severe for me (NB: other people's opinions may vary. I won't pretend that I haven't been busted for reading the Internet when I should have been engaging in a conversation). If there's something important I need to get done, it gets done 95%-plus of the time with what I think is a respectable minimum of procrastination. Where I've acquired this skill is somewhat of a mystery to me, as my formal organizational skills have always been mediocre to non-existent; my best guess is that a solid decade of relentless academic deadlines have hardwired some reflexive planning capacity into me. Anyhow, since that's pretty well intact, I don't think that the Internet is ruining my life or my functioning by any means.

What I've increasingly come to question is whether my Internet habits are interfering with my happiness. One thing that I've found to be indisputably true is that the Web in general (and Google Reader in particular) is really effective at breaking up the flow of attention and prolonged engagement in doing something. This is an issue for me because while I find it hard to resist having a constant inflow of information, I also really value the subjective experience of being engrossed in one particular task. I find that when I've been concentrating all or most of my attention on one thing, not only does it get done more effectively, but I feel more relaxed, calm, and alert in a way that's just not possible to achieve when browsing RSS feeds. At its best, I begin to see myself as putting all of my capacities to work and reaching a level of performance that's deeper and better than the day-to-day. The book by Nick Carr that I mentioned above is called The Shallows, and I get why he entitled it that, because I really do think that Web surfing and computer multitasking are fairly shallow endeavors, cognitively speaking.

Luckily, a decent part of my workday involves face to face contacts with patients for therapy or assessment, which I find to be very conducive to focusing, probably in large part because it's interesting and challenging and I'm not in front of a computer while doing it. I'm extremely fortunate in that regard; if my job required me to be at a desk in front of a computer all the time (as opposed to just part of the time, since I do a fairly substantial amount of entering notes and reports into medical records) I'd probably have a lot more difficulty with staying on task. Still, I've made it somewhat of a pet project to consciously decrease my tendencies toward distraction and multitasking and increase my ability to focus on one thing at a time. My inspirations for doing this were this old Lifehacker interview with an author of a book critical of multitasking, which solidified some of the observations I had made of myself, and another recent New York Times piece on people who collect and track data about their daily lives, which gave me some ideas on how to go about an endeavor like this.

Although it may seem bitterly ironic, my approach to this is actually extremely reliant on technology - specifically, my iPhone. I mainly use two programs, the first of which is Evernote, a very cool application that lets me enter and sync notes, photos, and web clips between my computer and my phone. Each day, I start a note specifically dedicated to that day's activities, which I update every hour or so with very basic information about what I'm doing and how well I feel like I'm focusing on a 1-10 scale, with 5 being my baseline and 7-8 being the sweet spot. I only update my note when it's convenient to do so to avoid the monitoring interfering with the activity, which isn't hard to do. This gives me a semi-quantitative account of how my day is going as well as a place to jot down ideas on the fly about how to reduce distractions. Right now, I'm not tracking anywhere near as much data as some of the people in the Times article do, basically just level of focus and number of hours of sleep per night, but I may add more in the future if it becomes useful to do so.

The second thing I use is Google Tasks, which is actually an integrated part of Gmail. It's fairly basic - there's a lot more elaborate things out there - but it's free and has a nice mobile interface that makes it easy to check off and add new things on the go. I've started separating my tasks out into separate lists, one for work, one for home, one for things I need to get at the store, etc. I do this partially for a reminder of things I need to get done and partially because I find it really rewarding to be able to cross things off of my list. One of the nice things about Google Tasks is that it gives you a checkbox and a line through items you check off until you clear out your completed tasks, which lets you bask in your accomplishments a little bit. Here's an example of my work-related task list right now:

I've also started playing around with some other ideas, like allowing myself 5-10 minute distraction breaks but enforcing them by turning on the stopwatch in my phone and having it visible so as to not let myself run over. I'm sure there's a lot of other things I could be doing, too. It's still early, but I'm excited about this project and I think it's going to be very valuable in the long run if I can stick with it. I'd appreciate any other tips or strategies that other people have found helpful in doing something like this. Also, I'd like to note that for the hour-plus I've been composing this entry, I didn't check my Google Reader once, despite it being open in the browser tab adjacent to this one, which is the sort of small victory I'm gunning for here...