First things first: I do not mean with this article to belittle or ridicule those who struggle with real Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Rather, I wish to ponder why those of us blessed to not face that disease day after day would self-impose a way of living that diminishes, if not destroys, our ability to dwell on any one task, issue, or thought for more than a few seconds.

I recall growing up, wondering why class periods lasted forty-five minutes. My mother, a teacher, explained how studies showed that the young student’s mind does best when not submitted to any one subject for more than forty minutes. The extra five provided in-and-out transition time. If you suspect those studies are now, like, way dated, good on you. Apparently, attention spans these days hover at around 31 seconds!

Other such standards abound in media: sitcoms last thirty minutes (twenty when you rip commercials), episodic TV around an hour (again, subtract for advertisements), and, on average, movies range from 90-120 minutes. Except Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit, of course, whose awesomeness-replete story-telling makes those three hours seem like forty minutes, right?

To some extent, those media examples can get some of the blame for the phenomenon I discuss here. Who, would, after all, want to invest one to two weeks to work through Lord Of The Rings or Ana Karenina, when a (tops!) three hour span will get you the same (OK, or equivalent) storytelling experience? Newspapers like USA Today responded to visually stimulated/reduced attention spans with their shorter, snappier, bite-sized stories. Still, who remembers what they heard about that (what?) town ISIS took over last week (or was it the week before)?

Yes, it appears our cultural and personal ADD has been bubbling and boiling us media consumers (a.k.a., frogs) for quite some time. Yet, no media technological development has promoted our self-imposed, voluntary ADD more profoundly than the advent and, by now, full fruition of social media. Hand in hand with social media’s Big So What, it turns out we must contend with the relentless, continuously flowing way it nitpicks our time away. Textual messaging, imagery, and notifications thereof keep coming at us, taking us away from whatever we’re doing, at times from whatever other social media we’re tending, but more troubling, from those tasks that require concentration and concerted slices of time.

It would help to note that this concerns more than productivity. Yes, constant interruptions and distractions can diminish our ability to churn out “product.” But the concerns run at a more basic, core level. Before one can ever produce, one must reflect and envision that end product. Can we really do that when our minds get preconditioned to skip and jump among unrelated, often non-supporting tasks? Where is that time to sit back and ponder deeper things? When do we stop, close our eyes and do some hard-nosed introspection and self-examination?
Thinking on that latter question, sometimes I wonder whether we voluntarily indulge in a cacophony of distractions precisely because we want to avoid the answers we might uncover when we engage in that hard-nosed introspection and self-examination.

Ouch.

As a writer, one that seeks to write stories that mean more than a thrill ride, I grapple daily with this very question. How can I truly search and portray the depths of the human condition, for instance, if (a) I am plowing ahead to get the story done (a.k.a., productivity), while (b) I spend gobs of time on social media to engage with like-minded folks in hopes that they’ll turn into readers (a.k.a., marketing), and along the way (c) get drowned by the barrage of–OK, let’s stipulate, for the sake of argument–interesting information (a.k.a., noise) at the detriment of searching and discovery deeper meaning?

Double-ouch.

How about you? How do you set time aside from social media and all the other distracting elements of life to examine what matters?