Wednesday 14 September 2011

Greatest song about procrastination ever...

http://new.music.yahoo.com/nancy-white/tracks/procrastination-rag--21775876


Heard this on CBC while we were waiting in line for a ferry to the Kingston Peninsula... hilarious!

Friday 29 April 2011

National political polls

You may have noticed my prolonged absence over the last couple of weeks - I've come down with a bad case of election fever.  The polls are like crack to me - I've checked them every day for the last two weeks, sometimes more than once.  Elections I care about are even worse than my second favorite distraction of the moment, checking the mail room (on the chance that a letter about my funding will be there). 

I won't attempt to count the hours, but let's just say while I've been arguing with uninformed or close-minded party-loyalists, documenting the changing whims of public opinion, reading candidate profiles and platforms, and looking up every Harper-bashing link my friends post on Facebook, there has been little time for blogging.

Thursday 7 April 2011

The secret to email management

After listening to that podcast I tried to manage my email more effectively, and as it turns out, things just got worse.  Mind you, I wasn't checking email every 5-10 minutes for 1 minute because I was trying not to, it had more to do with being the end of term and having a whole bunch of panicked students trying to submit their final reports electronically, but nevertheless, I was looking at my taskbar's Outlook icon almost every other minute, waiting for some new emergency to pop up so I wouldn't have to think about working...

Today, I had a lot of work to get done, and so I just decided to close Outlook completely, and focus on the task at hand.  And you know, it's amazing how much more I've gotten done without that little bell and icon popping up every time I get a new message. 

The moral here is, if you want to reduce email checking but don't have the discipline to avoid looking every time the icon thingy says you have one, just close the program down.

Saturday 2 April 2011

Multitasking

I was listening to a recent episode of Nora Young's CBC program "Spark", on the topic of chronic multitasking behaviour.  After a brief introductory spot discussing the dangers of distraction while cycling (of all potentially dangerous things to be distracted from, why she chose cycling I'll never know), she interviewed a behavioural researcher named Clifford Nass from Stanford University, who has been studying a phenomenon he called chronic media multitasking, defined as constantly checking text messages, emails, facebook, etc., while trying to accomplish other thingsNow, the standard interpretation of this behaviour is that it leads to reduced productivity or efficiency because you're constantly losing little bits of time here and there as you progress through your daily tasks.  What's interesting about Dr. Nass' findings is that these types of behaviour also apparently influence the way we think, not just the amount of time we have for thinking; people who chronically multitask have less ability to filter out irrelevant information.  And, contrary to what you may think, frequent multitasking does not make you better at it - it only amplifies the behavioural problems.

It struck me that this may be a case of neuroplasticity - of people changing their brain physically or chemically by positively reinforcing specific thought patterns.  If we spend a lot of our time thinking in a certain way, we end up training our neural circuitry to grow in ways that bypass other potential deviations in thought. 
So the more we multitask, the less ability we have to derail that multitasking behaviour when we need to focus more intensely on something for a period of time.

Of course, this trend in behaviour is largely attributed to the widespread use of things like smart-phones and other portable devices.  When we have these things right at our fingertips, we grab hold of them the moment we get bored with the task at hand, whether that is checking email intermittently while working on a paper, sending text messages while in class, or answering a phone call while in the middle of a movie.  In fact, in a survey of other professional researchers, Dr. Nass found that the most common reason for checking email was not feeling that something important was waiting, but wanting to put off the thing they are doing for a little bit longer.  In his own words, "Multi-tasking is an escape..."

He suggests that when we check email, we should devote at least 15 minutes to it, not the 1-2 minute frequent we seem to lean towards as a form of procrastination, and do it far less frequently.  Both the duration and the timing of our distractions require consideration if we are to shed the cloak of self-destructive false-productivity that we think of as multitasking. 

My own goal for the coming week is to try avoiding the 1-minute email checks during the day and force myself to sit down and read or write for longer periods of time. We'll see how that goes.

Friday 25 March 2011

Forgot the mail

I mentioned in the previous post that I had a 'distraction moment' while writing it:

Before I posted the last one, my wife mentioned that she had neglected to get the mail on her way in, and wondered if I could go get it.  I replied that I would, and decided to be extra efficient and let the cat in at the same time (I had let him outside a few hours back and it was getting dark so it was time to come in).  So I went to get the cat, and was pleasantly surprised when he came almost instantly at my call - so surprised in fact, that I let him in, went back upstairs, and finished the blog post - completely forgetting the mail.  As I was finishing up, my wife asked if I got the mail, and I admitted to having forgotten, even though that was the main reason I went outside in the first place.  

Basically, I was distracted by my blog about distraction.  (sigh).

I'm going to go get that mail now (wish me luck).

Dealing with distraction: The basic premise

I often poke fun at my wife for her limited attention span when we're sitting in a pub across from a television set; it doesn't matter what's on, it could be golf, car racing, stock updates, or a soap opera, her eyes are drawn to it like iridescent bluets to the porch light on a mid-summer's evening (to any entomologists out there, I know that bluets don't fly much past dinner-time, but there aren't any crepuscular critters that more aptly describe the colours in her eyes).  It's not that she doesn't care about what I (or someone else) is saying, it's that the intense colours, varied movement, and constant sound of a television set is difficult to compete with for almost anyone's attention.  My face is more limited to a few shades of colour between beige-tinted white and rose, occasional contortions of a few narrow-ranged muscles and a voice that is easily over-powered by the clamor of a noisy public-house; perhaps I have an advantage of three dimensionality, but this will probably not be an advantage for long by the way our entertainment technology is advancing these days.  No, the television is definitely more interesting than I am in this situation, so to deal with this distraction, I strategically take the seat that faces the television myself when we go to a restaurant or pub with TV's.  Not that I'm really any better at avoiding distraction in general mind you.  I'm probably a much more accomplished procrastinator than my wife, and procrastination is in many ways an outward manifestation of distractability, but I seem to be able to avert my eyes from the TV a little more easily than she can. 

Lest I mislead the reader into thinking otherwise, I want to qualify that this blog is not, in fact, meant to be a complaint session of how people these days prefer to stare at their phones, laptops, and eyelids (the inside, more specifically), than at their teachers.  Such a topic would be an endlessly entertaining way to vent and would probably generate a broad following of similarly frustrated or disenchanted teachers, but no, it's been done.  Many times.  And although I will certainly draw on the relationship between our increasingly ADD society and the powerful stimuli we are constantly presented with through such media as i-phones and laptops, this blog is more personal than that.

I qualified in the first paragraph that I'm probably a far more effective procrastinator than my wife is; I will now be so bold as to qualify that statement even further, and say that I am probably a more effective procrastinator than most of you ever were or will be.  This doesn't mean that I can't focus at all - obviously writing a masters thesis in biology requires at least a little bit of focus - rather, it means that my brain is really good at coming up with other things to do instead of what I should be doing, and at finding ways to justify pursuing these alternate tasks.  This leads to me often being late, because I come up with last-minute things that need to be done before I leave or before I get to the more important tasks.  I get less done, because so much time is taken up with trivial momentary fancies, and occasionally, I even miss-out entirely on really great opportunities because I'm so busy playing catch-up all the time.  I would even go so far as to say that my habit of procrastination has reduced the time I can spend with my friends and family and the number of vacations I can take, and increased my stress level substantially.  Basically, it really sucks to be an easily distracted person when you have lofty goals, but there's no denying that this is exactly what I am at this point.

So now that I have identified what I consider to be a fairly significant problem, you might be wondering if this entire blog is going to be about the funny things that result from my short attention span be applied to a PhD program, my personal life, etc.  The answer is "not entirely", but yes, I will be posting some entertaining stories of my absent-mindedness.  My next post will be one such story in fact, one that came up while I was writing this that was too good not to share.  But more importantly, this blog will be about my efforts to get a grip on my attention span, and to become more efficient and productive in general.  I will draw from the psychology literature, personal experience, my friends, and whatever else I can to increase my self-discipline, create more focus and self-awareness, and most importantly, get enough done during the week that I can feel comfortable about using the weekend to rest or pursue non-academic interests (as a procrastinator, I have many of them).  I look forward to using this as a tool for self-reflection and personal development, and I hope along the way I can entertain, educate, and perhaps even inspire my readers to make similar personal goals.  Here goes nothing!!