Oh Dave! Now

What a week on the job. I cranked out so much “product” that it’s a bit of a blur, and accounting for it all takes real effort. But I’ll try:

• Prepared/typed up a 74-page Powerpoint presentation, including coordination of getting 53 color copies printed landscape, double-sided, three-hole punched, and stapled in the upper left corner. (Cost to my personal Visa card: $1,704.31) And then carrying the box of copies on the subway from Oakland to San Francisco to deliver it to the hotel where the conference was taking place. And then doing an electronic expense report and Fed-x’ing the original with receipts to Pennsylvania for processing.
• Edited three quarterly financial reports (20 pages each), proofread against corresponding Excel files, 6 tabs per file, and then Win-zipped and e-mailed drafts to the client for review.
• Updated three File Code Listings (about 14 pages each) for three different projects, to incorporate new work orders received from the client.
• Proofread and formatted two technical reports, one about real estate acquisition (12 pages), another about a bus fleet management plan (25 pages). This involves painstakingly reading every word of the report, paying attention to punctuation, logic, acronyms, formatting, and consistency. I processed both on Friday, in the course of a day—received them in the morning, sent them to the client for review before close of business.
• Developed from scratch in Excel 12-month staffing plans for two regions, taking into account all current work orders, future work orders, and current and future staff members. Each file has a tab for each staff person (25 so far for one region) that rolls up into a Summary sheet. Hours and cost are tabulated by month on the bottom, by task in the far right columns, and the two approaches reconciled in the lower right corner.
• Typed up minutes for a quarterly meeting from the project manager’s hand-written notes, converted PDFs to JPEG files and inserted into the Word document, and transferred info from a sign-in sheet to a grid of attendees by organization. Sent out for review.
• Several other little tasks that came and went, whatever they were, it doesn’t matter now. Lots of e-mails to be sure.

Still with me? If so, congratulations, you have the capacity for paying attention to details. Or did you just quickly scan the above list?

Thankfully, I was able to work at home on Friday. The meeting minutes did me in, and I collapsed in a reclining chair, turned off my mind to work, and snoozed for about an hour. I even dreamed. It amazes me how much I accomplished, but it took its toll. I love my job and the company I work for and even love being busy. To make deadlines, I ate lunch while I worked on a couple of days. I didn’t sleep well Wednesday or Thursday because my mind kept racing, going over what I had worked on during the day, and what I had to accomplish the next. The only exercise I had time for was walking the dog for four blocks twice a day. Meals were take-out or quickly prepared soup, leftovers, and frozen stir-fry.

The work I do as our department’s “Quality Monitor” takes real concentration. It can be a challenge because there are many interruptions, external and internal. I am the last one to read reports before they go to our client for review or for final submittal. From the number of errors and inconsistencies I find in important information, it’s clear the concentration of other people is similarly scattered. And I’m not perfect—when filing the reports later, I find details I wished I had caught.

Diminished attention span has been getting a lot of attention in the media recently. I read a review in the San Francisco Chronicle about a 276-page book on the subject, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr, who believes that the physical structure of our brains is changing in order to manage increased multi-tasking brought on by the internet. I haven’t read the book, but it sounds interesting, and it’s not too long so maybe I’ll order a copy online. From what I read in the review and on Amazon, it makes sense. Our brains are adapting to the type of information we receive on the internet and via e-mail, Smart Phones, Facebook, and Twitter. Most of the information comes in small bites, sometimes all at once. Texting (and Prince song titles) rely on abbreviated code such as LOL, IMHO, WTF, KISS, CYA.  Emoticons reduce communication even further to simple graphics.   >:-(

Carr points out the obvious: that we are scanning text and following links on the internet more than deep, concentrated reading. We scan a list of responses to a Google search. We scan through status updates of our friends on Facebook. We scan lists of songs on iTunes and Amazon. Our queues on Netflix. Reviews and comments on Yelp and YouTube. Lists of people online that want to hook up. The string of incomplete sentences in this paragraph. And as we scan, we make instant decisions of what to focus on, what or who to ignore.

Scanning versus concentrated reading isn’t new. In 6^th grade I was in an advanced, self-directed reading program. My teacher, Mrs. Barrett, suggested that I increase my book count by scanning through novels and only stopping to focus on important plot or character information. I thought she was crazy. The writer took the time to write each and every sentence; to this day I take the time to read each and every word. For over 60 years Evelyn Wood has been pushing speed-reading courses that rely on scanning.

The concern is that if our brains are adapting to scan bites (my term) of information, our brains will lose the physical capacity to focus and concentrate on longer articles, novels, and even symphonies. The quality of our mental capacity and creativity will lessen; our attention to detail will get worse. Hello, Facebook; goodbye Shakespeare and Tolstoy. It stretched my mental capacity as a 20-year-old to read, for example, the final Penelope chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The famous “yes I said yes I will Yes” soliloquy of Molly Bloom is eight run-on paragraphs/sentences with no punctuation that go on for 46 pages. How will future generations get through it, or even Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” monologue which is only 276 words or 1,214 characters?

Twitter is infamous for its 140 character limit per text message. The number of characters in this blog so far is 5,396. (If you have read this far, your brain isn’t entirely shot to hell.) The Huffington Post has a blog entry titled “Overloaded: 7 Things You Should Know about your Internet-Interrupted Brain.” But it’s a mere 1,581 characters and a list, contributing to the problem IMHO (that’s “in-my-humble-opinion” for you non-texters). The post has so far generated 159 user comments—a quick scan shows most are in agreement about the decline of Western concentration, but some think the hoopla is a multi-tasker’s buzz-kill.

Other than technical reports at work, nowadays I mostly read magazines, two in particular. I’ve subscribed to Entertainment Weekly since its debut in 1990. Its editorial style is sarcastic, and it’s entertaining, light reading. The other magazine takes more concentration. Friends recently gifted Eric and me with a year’s subscription to The New Yorker, which I subscribed to for several years during and after college but could never keep up with. Now, I’m being selective with what articles I read, because in contrast to most magazines and newspapers, its articles tend to be long. An article on gay marriage spanned across 12 pages and 50,983 characters—I didn’t finish that one, but it was very engaging and thoughtful for 6-7 pages.

I always have a book going, usually a literary-type novel, but it’s slow going as I only read 5-10 pages at bedtime. During childhood I was teased for being a book worm. I sat for hours on the sofa or lying in bed, absorbed in a book. I was reminded on a recent long weekend of how relaxing that can be. We stayed in a cottage in the woods about a mile inland from the Mendocino coast of California. It was cool and foggy most of the time, so we bundled up under throw-blankets on two sofas. Taking up my current book, The Age of Dreaming, about the memories of a fictitious Japanese-American silent film star, I read uninterrupted for an hour. I got up and used the bathroom, poured a glass of water, had a snack, and returned to the sofa. And read uninterrupted for about another hour and a half.

It’s the most relaxed I’ve felt in years, in that my mind wasn’t racing. I was at one with the universe of the novel. We didn’t have internet access in the cottage, and our cell phones were out of range, not what we expected, but a fortunate situation. I was relieved to know that I could settle my mind and read something in-depth for an extended period of time without distraction or feeling that I should be doing something else. Unlike proof-reading and processing technical reports on a tight deadline, reading the novel didn’t exhaust me. My mind was energized at the same time that it was calmed. I wonder if that degree of relaxation will be possible with e-books, especially if they become more interactive, as has been speculated.

Short of technological isolation, there are other methods, good and bad, of improving our attention spans, and off-setting the effects on the brain of internet browsing. 60 Minutes reported that high school and college students are illicitly using Ritalin and Adderall to boost academic concentration and excellence. Both of the prescription drugs are intended for patients with clinical Attention-Deficit Disorder (ADD). But they’ve been found to be useful for concentrated studying, paper-writing, and exam-taking, when No-Doz and Starbucks aren’t cutting it. The drugs stimulate dopamine in the brain, helping students to become more detail-oriented, alert, and interested. Opponents argue that the drugs are addictive and amount to cosmetic neurology. The same ethical arguments against performance-enhancing steroids for athletes are raised for these pill-popping academics, especially when they continue using the drugs in the workplace upon graduation.  

Don’t want to resort to drugs for yet another personal deficiency? Posit Science, as featured on PBS, offers Brain Fitness software to improve memory and focus. A Google search brought up free, sensible suggestions for 6 Ways to Improve Your Brain on the Health Zone website that essentially involves focusing on one activity at a time. I read somewhere recently that a study shows that taking regular walks improves brain function for the elderly—in general, physical movement and increased blood circulation equals a healthier brain. Ditto for drinking a sufficient amount of water everyday. And don’t forget yoga, meditation, Sudoku, Scrabble, crossword puzzles, and the Hocus Focus puzzle in the Sunday comics.

Every morning I do five Brain Gym movement and balancing exercises that are designed to get all parts of the brain working in coordination. It has helped me to reduce stress. Also, when I’m trying to remember a fact or word that’s “on the tip of my tongue,” I’ve found that rubbing my “brain buttons” helps to unlock my brain, and the missing information comes to mind. I don’t do it in public, though, as people think I’m practicing a different sort of self-stimulation.

Writing today’s entry has also been a good change of pace from my normal brain activities on the job. In fact, maintaining “Oh Dave Now” exercises the creative side of my brain. But I’ve reached 1,972 words and 9,686 characters, and this is beginning to feel too much like work. Pardon me while I log-off and get some exercise or lose my mind in a book. And you, dear reader, who have paid attention to the end, have nothing to worry about. Your brain is fine.