Writing for life

Published in the Evening Echo 28/04/2008

Do you ever feel that there aren’t enough hours in the day? Well, you’d be right. Researchers in the US recently discovered that typical middle-class city dwellers are cramming 31 hours worth of ‘life’ into each 24 hour period thanks to multi-tasking and an array of time saving gizmos.

Hands up who’s checked their e-mail on their laptop or blackberry while making their morning coffee? Or used a bluetooth headset to join a conference call on the commute to work, while listening to the traffic report on the radio and checking out alternative routes on the sat-nav?

We’re multi-tasking like crazy to try and squeeze more into our busy lives. Apparently the technology of today has allowed us, for better or for worse, to shoe-horn an additional seven hours worth of tasks into the average day compared to only a decade ago (primitive old 1998 – back when nobody had ever heard of Google).

After a flurry of activity in the morning we arrive at work – which is often a blur of e-mails, calls and meeting combines with switching between multiple tasks to meet unrealistic deadlines. But, according to the study, conducted by global consumer research firm OTX, all of the multitasking we do during our working day pales in comparison to the frantic task juggling that happens once we get home in the evenings.

“People will be pushing the television remote control while surfing on a wireless laptop computer balanced on their knee, e-mailing and texting friends on a mobile phone and holding a conversation with friends or spouse,” Patrick Moriarty, one of the authors of a report to be published this summer, told reporters. “They may be far more mentally engaged than they are at the office,” he said.

The study in question involved 3,000 people, and looked at their main focus of attention at different times of day. While it discovered that television remains the biggest draw, almost half of all respondents were also using computers and/or phones to catch up with friends, update their social networks, download and listen to music, or whatever else. Even eating took second place to online activity in half of the households surveyed.

But is all this multitasking a good thing? Are we using the extra hours productively to enrich our lives and make ourselves happy… or are we just cramming increasing amounts of work into already overburdened schedules? I’d like to think it’s the former… but suspect deep down that it’s probably the latter.

My big problem with all this multitasking is that I’m a firm believer that the key to being successful at anything, at home or at work, is to apply regular, focused attention to it. But with so many opportunities to multi-task I find my attention becoming more and more fragmented every day, making it very difficult to concentrate on any one thing… and that’s got to be counter productive.

Somewhere in the relentless drive for increased productivity we seem to have lost sight of the fact that we all need to switch off and recharge the batteries every once in a while. If we don’t do that, then the 31 hour day could well be a harbinger of doom.