Whenever there is real, serious work to do (hint: always), I launch a campaign of unproductive, semi-productive or (my favorite) productive-of-things-unrelated-to-what-I’m-supposed-to-be-doing work. This freshly-redesigned blog is in fact the product of having lots and lots of important papers to read. Naturally, I’m ultimately glad that I put the effort in, because not only does it give me an easy path to writing for a (pretend) audience, it gives me another thing that I arguably ought to be doing anyway, just not right now.
In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I feel like there ought to be a word for the kind of productivity that is good and useful but totally ill-timed. Got any ideas? I haven’t enabled comments, and I’m not sure that I want to (which I guess means this isn’t a real blog), but my clever — if largely hypothetical — readers should be able to figure out how to contact me. Or better, write your own damn blog entry about it. If you link to me, I’ll see it.
Anyway, my real reason for sitting down to write this — the fact that I actually should be drafting a poster for the phonetics lab aside — was to document the various “alert levels” I typically experience in the process of finally trying to focus on the important tasks at hand. It is in fact an implicational hierarchy: if the conditions are met for a high alert level, you can count on the conditions having been met for all the lower levels too:
- Low: Not a care in the world. This is my usual state.
- Guarded: Have acknowledge my Internet-induced ADD is interfering with my work. Quit Tweetie.
- Elevated: Even without the constant updates from Twitter ensuring that I can’t pursue a train of thought for more than five minutes at a time, I am altogether-too-frequently Command-Tabbing over to NetNewsWire to see if anyone I care about on the Internet has published anything in the last few minutes. Can’t be behind on the news, after all. Quit NetNewsWire.
- High: I can still check Twitter and read blogs from the web. Plus, there is something out there for all tastes, moods and levels of abject boredom. And then there’s Wikipedia. Quit Safari.
- Severe: At this point I feel like I need medication to keep myself on track. Damn you Internet! The more steps I have to take to look up a passing curious thought on Wikipedia, the more opportunities I have to ask myself, “do I really need to know about the history of term limit legislation in the United States Congress, when I’m supposed to be writing about Binding Theory?” The answer is usually “no.” Turn off my Internet connection.
For all of this, what’s interesting to me is not the thesis that the Internet has made me incapable of focusing on anything for more than five minutes at a time. I don’t think that’s true. It’s that the Internet has so lowered the barriers between my thinking “oh, hey, what about…” and my being able to learn more about whatever random thing, that I just naturally tend towards complete distraction. I wonder, is there a natural limit to this? Or does the pattern hold such that the day that I get a direct feed to the Internet implanted in my brain, I will cease to function altogether? I wonder if Wikipedia has anything to say about this…
(P.S. For bonus points, guess which alert level I’m at as I write this!).