This article in the Wall Street Journal this week nicely captured my dilemma.

Most of my work is crisis-oriented: I’m on call for different projects and problems, most requiring “soon as possible” attention, although in reality they are easily rankable from “pants-on-fire” to “wouldn’t-it-be-nice” to “you-want-to-pay-me-to-save-you-seventy-seconds-a-year?” Part of what I’ve been doing for the last few years is “branding” myself, making my name known in certain circles so that I can pick up referral work. And I do. At the same time, part of that branding work involves getting my name in publications and working on various writing projects. That’s a different kind of work entirely.

The former proceeds down my pipeline greased largely by dint of its urgency and my desire to quickly find a resolution to an issue and please the partner or client I’m working with. That and the nice feeling you get sending out an invoice for work well-done. That sort of work is usually done in a multitasking environment. I might be on the phone with one client while I’m answering an email to another and waiting for something to finish on a third’s server. Into the gaps I pour documentation about what I’ve been working on, since without it, I probably won’t remember what I was doing in a couple of months. The latter type of project, writing and education-related, usually requires between twenty and eighty hours of focused work to accomplish, and sometimes it’s difficult for me to put even four hours a week into that sort of thing.

What makes it worse are the longer writing projects that don’t pay nearly as well as troubleshooting/maintenance/implementation work, which means that in the rare moment in which my plate is clear of consulting projects, I may just gaze glazedly out my window hoping that a new disaster recovery opportunity will arrive to save me from the fate of having to write about something I don’t care about in hopes that it will solve problems that haven’t happened yet… Have I told you? I love people, not technology. I try to prevent people from being victims of technology and instead try and move them to a place of being blessed by it. That’s my vision, mainly compassion-driven. But something about all this is leaving me feeling like a victim of my methods.

Maggie Jackson, author of the book Distracted, is quoted in the article:

“Relying on multitasking as a way of life, we chop up our opportunities and abilities to make big-picture sense of the world and pursue our long-term goals,” she writes. “The way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention – the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress.” Ms. Jackson concludes that “as we plunge into a new world of infinitely connectible and accessible information, we risk losing our means and ability to go beneath the surface, to think deeply.”

I haven’t read Ms. Jackson’s book, but the reviews I’ve read and the portions I’ve scanned remind me of Sven Birkert’s Gutenberg Elegies, in which he laments the passing of books and talks about what the paperless future portends. Fourteen years after reading that book, I’m less worried about his thesis. As far as Ms. Jackson, I might see her statements as Cassandra-like, possibly true but unlikely to be taken too seriously, except that I see their truth in my own life. How to be gathered up again?

**For me, the most memorable chapter was the one in which he wrote about his life, his attempt to write a novel, and the books that had left marks on his character. The book, while it had its good points, was a bit shrill: fourteen years after reading it and spending less time with paper books, now I’ve replaced them with audiobooks, not so much with the same books moved to a flickering screen***. And listening to books instead of reading them has been a wonderful shift for me. My attention drifts far less while listening to a book than while reading one, and while I might be tempted to skip/scan a boring-looking chunk of prose when it’s in my hand, I don’t remember having ever wished that I hadn’t had to listen to a particular few minutes of an audiobook. No, these audiobooks are not abridged.

***Replacing the reading of five to five-hundred pages at a time that are dedicated to a specific unified utterances with the constant reading of five paragraph stories/articles/blogs/discussions is something that the flickering screen does. I’m not the type of person who could read an entire .pdf version of a novel on a computer: the computer itself is the medium of multitasking and distraction. And this is what makes it hard to write a 40-page article on a computer. Imagine, wouldn’t it be cool if you had a computer that could only run one program at a time? Maybe they’ll invent something like that some day.