One easily identifiable trend in the data is that when I felt tired, I was more tempted to use my phone and more likely to multi-task. Having down time and being tired made it more likely that I wanted some kind of distraction or something to do that would help to stimulate me so that I was distracted from how tired I am. While I was waiting for a call or didn’t have pressing work to do, I would either use my phone mindlessly or find people to talk to without any real productive reason for doing so. I was also a bit stressed on this day thinking about an assignment that I had missed and at points found it difficult to focus because my mind kept wandering back to this missed assignment.
The nature of my job is to be distracted. I need to read the clients’ messages and identify the cause of their issues. A lot of the time that involves logging into their systems and constantly navigating through different pages. If anything, my job encourages the distraction of attention. That’s why the correlation between multi-tasking and being distracted is not always positive.
I did not feel I slept well the night before so I really only had about 3 hours that I would consider to be focused, productive work time. Despite that, when I got off work, I was still mentally and physically drained, and when I got home and would have had time to start working on the assignment, I was so exhausted, I ordered groceries and then went to bed and had a nap because I knew with my physical condition, I would not have been productive on my work anyways.
What I find interesting to reflect on is the usage specifically of my phone. In my view, my phone is not actually the distraction because at those points, I would be distracted no matter what, the phone is just the tool that draws my already distracted behaviour. Just like what Citton (2017) mentioned that it captures my attention without active thoughts. But there is a cycle here too. I am not disciplined as far as not looking at my phone before bed, which I think it’s common knowledge by this point that looking at your phone while lying in bed will affect the quality of your sleep. It’s this vicious cycle of, using my phone before bed affecting my quality of sleep which causes me to be tired at work which leads to me being distracted and unfocused at work which then causes me to look at my phone. This also leads to what Citton (2017) mentions about there not being enough time to take in the things we want to take in. Due to being overly tired and distracted, I have many unread books, un-listened podcasts, unpainted paintings, and other hobbies I would like to indulge in more, but often I get home from work and all I want to do is sleep. Especially right now, there are also so many things going on between full-time working, Masters homework, a workshop that I am currently taking around how to start your own business, and the necessities of day-to-day life (cooking, cleaning, relationships) that the stress of being pulled in so many different directions can sometimes just lead to going to bed because I’m mentally drained and have nothing left.
Taking this into a work context for me, I found Citton’s (2017) discussion of the amount of information and stuff available to us interesting and it is a problem for my company and for teachers. Jensen and De Castell (2004) also discuss how the attention economy has impacted education in a big way for both teachers and students. One of my previous roles was as the technology coordinator for my school. One major issue for teachers in tech is that there are so, so many available tools for tech and teachers often don’t have the time and skill to research them. They are also constantly changing and new ones are always being developed. Having a person who is knowledgeable and able to devote the time to looking into all of the available resources is important. That being said, the attention economy gets in the way here too. How many tools have never gotten the market share they deserve because they couldn’t attract enough attention. An example of this would be the LMS tools our school has used. We used three of them: Engrade, Powerschool and Schoology. As far as the gradebook functions that we needed, Engrade was easily the best and easiest to use for teachers but was discontinued due to lack of profitability. Powerschool was easily the worst, lacked usability and wasted so much of our teachers/administrators and support staff’s time and yet it is by far the largest and most well known of the three. Schoology is fine and is now owned by Powerschool but thankfully was not developed by them. Education has a big problem with the attention economy. How many times has a trend swept through education, been the “next big thing” for 18 months, and then rarely gets talked about ever again? Education has major problems with being able to stay focused and not get swept up in the “attention economy” just like regular people.
References:
Citton, Y. (2017). Introduction and conclusion: From attention economy to attention ecology. In Y. Citton, The ecology of attention. John Wiley & Sons.
de Castell, S., & Jenson, J. (2004). Paying attention to attention: New economies for learning. Educational Theory, 54(4), 381–397.