We live in an ’Age of Distraction’ and reading may be the cure

A new report suggests that on average we are unable to focus on a task for more than 11 minutes without being tempted by email, Facebook or Twitter. Ironically, reading may be the cure, says Aileen Lee

THERE is a new watch on the market: the Tikker. Not only does it tell the time, it will tell you how many years you have left to live.

Now juxtapose it with another range of novelty jewellery and tell me which is more depressing.

Ringly’s ‘wearable technology’ is a dapper line of 18-carat gold rings fitted with precious stones. You connect one of the rings to your smartphone and it will vibrate and light up in different patterns to alert you to texts, calls and reminders.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m wearing 18-carat-something, I don’t want it to be a reminder of my to-do-lists or work emails.

The two products say a lot about how we should spend our time and how we actually do spend it. Did your morning start a little like this, for example?

You switch the alarm off on your phone and, before you are out of bed, you have checked your emails, your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

The same happens on your commute to work: you jump from one app to the other on your phone. Perhaps you scan-read a few articles; maybe you only read the headlines on various websites.

If anyone was to ask you, at the end of the journey, what you had been reading, you probably couldn’t tell them.

Into work and you power on your computer, log into your emails, and off you go, spending a day flitting between projects, never fully focused on the one task, because, behind that Word document or Excel spreadsheet is a myriad of new emails awaiting you in your inbox, each of which will send your mind off on a different train of thought.

Welcome to the ‘Age of Distraction’, my friends. You and I have been living like this for quite a while now — the irony being that with greater access to information and to each other, we are also increasingly living in partial attention.

We are literally all thumbs when it comes to communication, but face-to-face conversation has become stop-and-go.

We seem unable to sit in the company of friends, family, or colleagues without a personal device on-hand to check in with people elsewhere.

Life, as we live it now, happens in between the constant interruptions. How we work is a case in point, as Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, discovered in 2004, when she conducted a study of the work habits of employees at two West Coast high-tech firms.

One of her students, Victor Gonzalez, spent 1,000 hours noting how many times the employees were interrupted and how long each of them was able to work on any individual task.

On review of the data, Mark found that each employee spent only 11 minutes on any project, before being interrupted to do something else. Those 11 minute segments were further divided into, on average, three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a web page or working on a spreadsheet.

The study also showed that it took, an average, 25 minutes for the worker to return to the original task, after a distraction.

Interestingly, Mark found in a second study, afterwards, that interrupted workers work faster, but experience greater stress.

The ability to pay attention, that cognitive muscle that lets us follow a story or task through to the end, to learn or create, and to focus in work, is quickly becoming the super-skill of the 21st century. After all, if we are constantly interrupted and distracted by online and offline forums, then how can we ever get anything done?

And, more importantly, how do we find the time to formulate clear and developed thoughts?

The encroachment of the digital era on our ability to read, to focus beyond a few paragraphs, because of that anxious need to be always connected, is highlighted in David Ulin’s book, The Lost Art of Reading — Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time. We all have our personal examples of it being near impossible to focus on the one story, to unwind, and to stay with the book without a manic need to constantly ‘check-in’ with the rest of the world. I, for one, am guilty as charged.

Ulin writes that reading “requires us to pace ourselves…In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail.” It, above all, requires us to press the pause button on the world around us, and to reflect, to switch off and engage with our imagination.

For the younger generation, born into the digital era, never has it been more important for us to lead by example and to swap the device in their hands for a book.

Reading to children, and fostering their love of reading, aids children in the development of their language and logical thinking. It improves their communication skills, their academic performance, and, wait for it…enhances their concentration.

According to the National Adult Literacy Agency (NALA), reading aloud with your young child combines the benefits of talking, listening and storytelling within a single activity and builds the foundation for language development.

“From stories, your child learns many things, such as how to listen and concentrate, new words and to understand why things happen. They also learn to put ideas in order, develop their memory skills, notice how spoken words relate to words on the page and learn how to predict. Reading gives your child a chance to develop their own opinions, build visual skills and learn how to handle books,” says Inez Bailey, director of NALA.

“If you can spare 10 minutes a day to read with your child, you can make a huge difference to their development.

“You don’t have to read a book; you could read a comic, magazine article or a story you have made up yourself. The most important thing is that you enjoy it. That way your child will, too,” she says.

There are other benefits to reading, but, in this age of distraction, we can all appreciate the importance of sitting ourselves, and our children, down with a book.

Hey, Steve Jobs himself limited his children’s exposure to digital devices, and internet entrepreneur Evan Williams, a founder of Twitter, said in a New York Times article in September that, in lieu of iPads, his children have hundreds of books at home to read.

A 2010 study found that the more stories that pre-school children have read to them, the keener is their ability to empathise with others.

In essence, reading helps us hone our real-life social skills, and what better way to prepare your child for all the situations they will have to navigate than by reading to them, and encouraging them to read as they get older?

TIPS FOR PARENTS

In the publication, Your Child in Primary School – Tips for Parents, the Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) gives the following tips in relation to reading and preparing your child for school:

1. Read to your child regularly. This encourages a love of books and creates an interest in reading.

2. Ensure that reading is an enjoyable experience – short enjoyable experiences are best.

3. Pay attention to the mechanics of reading, such as holding the book and turning the pages. Let your finger go under the words as you read from left to right. The child’s main interest will be in pictures, so allow time to examine and comment on them.

4. Encourage them to repeat what happened in the story and to talk about their favourite bit. Play “what do you think would have happened if…!” games, or “what would you have done if you were … ?”

5. Enjoy nursery rhymes together.

6. If your child has English as an additional language it is important that you choose suitable reading material. Check with your school for advice.