Over the past 10 years, I’ve morphed from a gainfully-employed full-time bread-winning software developer who snobbishly refused to touch a cell phone, to a smartphone-toting stay-at-home Dad.
I don’t need a lot of convincing to accept the points Newport makes in this little snippet, my experience illustrates them too clearly.
Now that my kid is finally in school during the day, I have a few clear hours of time every day, but I still can’t get anything done. I feel my ability to concentrate long and/or deeply on a complex problem or project has just been wrecked. Deleted. Gone as if I had never possessed it.
Which bothers me very – whoops, gotta go.
And jokes aside, yes, unfortunately, “A directory of mostly wonderful things” is going to become part of your problem if you use it to “bathe yourself in novel stimuli” every time you have a spare bit of downtime. Particularly if it’s part of a web of links to other things, and tied to a social component. Like BoingBoing is.
There’s probably a healthier way to engage with social media, news feeds, and their old-school predecessors (like group blogs, like Boing Boing). How much would we like to bet that RSS readers, which the big internet/media companies have been sort of pushing aside, are a part of a good solution? It’s not in Facebook’s short-term interest for you to “engage” with your job.
