One commenter notes: "Scarily, it also appears to be highly addictive - sort of like acquired attention deficit disorder, making it quite difficult to focus on one thing, even when it's necessary/there's time to do so." Another wonders about whether this may affect personal happiness.
I'd mentioned to my supervisor today that I have a lot of trouble attending to things/people/whatever for very long. Even if I've just asked someone a question and they're in the middle of answering it, I *think* I'm listening, but then half the time it turns out that, really, I zoned out 20 seconds into their response. Never mind paying attention to an entire lecture. Hell, these days, it's not uncommon for me to forget what I'm saying mid-sentence, my train of thought having spontaneously jumped tracks against my will.
This is something that I've been struggling with to an increasing extent lately, and it's something that I really want to fix. I feel like I've all but lost my ability to get -- and remain -- engaged in a single task. To sit down and read something, start to finish, without punctuating my reading with five other things. Even the very blog post that got me thinking about this in the first place: I clicked to the page, read the title and the first paragraph or so, thought something to the effect of, "Oh, this is interesting; I want to read this,"... and yet, moments later, found that I had -- for some inexplicable reason and without consciously intending to do so -- flipped back to Google Reader and was checking my other feeds. Huh?
This wasn't always the case: I definitely didn't have this problem during the first couple years of my undergrad... and I'm not sure at what point my powers of attention started to waste away into practically nothing. By default I'd blame the undergrad education system somehow... the same way I blame it for turning me into a highly time-effective assessment-acing machine whose mental-bulimia approach to studying got her through three years of school with strong grades and no learning. (Not of the course material, anyway.) And by "turning me into", I suppose I really mean "letting me get away with being" -- since, in my view, no proper education system would let such student-bots through at anywhere near the top of their class.
But yeah... I think that in this case I can't rely solely on my good ol' scapegoat, The Postsecondary Education System, and must regretfully point the finger at what in fact *made* my undergrad experience (in a good way): my involvement in iGEM. Or, more accurately, the combination of iGEM and my need to see the whole picture and have a hand in everything. Heading up my team involved dealing with not only the project design stuff, but the lab work, the marketing, the funding proposals, the dozens of miscellaneous administration issues, as well as the management and coordination of people (full-time co-ops and other members) involved in each of the above... while somehow also doing my own coursework or research, as the case may have been. And I loved it; for however stressful it could get, it was also hugely rewarding. But I got really good at having a billion unrelated things flying around in my head at any given moment, ready to deal with whatever came up from one moment to the next, and I got really used to constantly switching tasks, switching modes... going from working on a proposal to helping someone troubleshoot in the lab to rescheduling some meeting or other at the last minute... somehow managing not to suffer from severe mental whiplash, but eventually relating all too well to the left side of this comic.
At some point I got past the micromanaging tendencies I once had and *actually* wanted to give other people oversight of things... and I got into the habit of looking things over only to the extent necessary to pass them off to the right person -- that is to say, very superficially, without any serious thinking involved. And despite all of the books and papers I once used to read at great length, these days I have to actively focus on reading continuously, forcing my eyes not to flit down through the beginning and end of each paragraph on a hasty hunt for the key points. (Okay, so maybe my days as a student-bot are partially to blame after all.)
I suppose, considering that haste is what got me here in the first place, there is no quick fix for my problem. Perhaps curling up in bed with a nice, long book will be a good first step toward rehabilitation.
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