“If you asked me the last time I just did a thing… and just did it… and wasn’t also trying to do something else… I wouldn’t be able to tell ya…”
Wow, did that strike a cord with a me! Life is busy, and in the struggle to “get it at all done”, the pressure is there to do more than one thing at a time. But is this multi-tasking helping or harming? Has the Internet helped to make us more productive? Or is it a colossal sucker of our precious time??
That quote is the opening line from the video below. This was shared with us by Alec on Twitter a couple weeks back. If you haven’t seen it yet, it is definitely worth a watch. The guy in the video is hilarious, in an awkward-unintentional way.
“To be fully present… on the Internet… at any one moment… is a very rare thing.”
Whenever and wherever you are reading this, chances are that it isn’t the only thing you are doing. How many tabs or apps do you have open? It seems totally ironic to me that I am writing about whether the Internet is really a productivity tool or merely an endless series of distractions whilst being endlessly distracted by the multitude of tabs I have open on my laptop, not to mention my phone dinging every minute or two. First, I just needed to finish off my attendance for the day on Maplewood. Then, I needed to update my Planbook for tomorrow (great program by the way), book a sub for Friday on Aesop, check the Weekly Schedule for EC&I 833, research “Tabless Thursdays“, and respond to timely emails. Oh, and write this blog post.
“Tabless Thursdays… it’s when you don’t really use the Internet in a traditional way… you just open a tab and you use it… Tabs are a metaphor for life”
I must admit that I was unfamiliar with #tablessthursday when I sat down to write this post (anyone else see tables instead of tabless??). Thankfully, a quick Google search gave me all the answers that I needed. Well maybe not all the answers… but 6,210 of them! #tablessthursday is a response to our societal “obsession” with multi-tasking. While the video focuses on Internet mult-tasking, I see evidence of this in all aspects of my life. Our society has glorified the idea of being busy, and it almost seems like a competition about who can be busier. How and why is this a good thing? Articles such as this one on “Why being too busy makes us feel good” show that this issue of busyness is on the minds of many. How do you deal with being busy? You multi-task. But maybe that isn’t the answer.
“Am I developing the inability to focus because I never focus on things?”
The Internet has created a world of ‘multitaskers’ who don’t accomplish as much as they could have without it. Proof- last year I did a 24-hour no technology challenge with my Gr 8 students. I was never so productive as for those 24 hours. No Facebook, no Snapchat, no Instagram, no email. I cooked, I cleaned, I picked up a book, I played outside with my kids. And I was much more focused on each of these single activities. Does this mean I want to give up the Internet? Not a chance.