Distraction is a problem commonly diagnosed in our internet-driven careers in an internet-driven society. The media encourages the conversation, alternately providing tips and tricks on how to increase your productivity while blaming Google for destroying culture or discussing the impossibility of classical genius in a modern time frame. Often targeted as the root of all employment frustrations or the cause of an unfortunately bad grade in school, the inability to process and retain information to the degree we desire is something many of us spend a lot of time talking and thinking about.

For the most part, I've become pretty tired of this conversation and don't feel like most recent contributions have been very productive. I don't mean to sound like a smug jerk about this, but we all know that change itself isn't inherently bad. As an adult who literally grew up with the internet, I don't think in terms of culture before vs. culture after the internet, and I've really enjoyed learning to live with so much information. Are our attention spans shorter than they used to be? Almost certainly. Are we trying to multi-task too much? Most definitely. Will society or individuals suffer from this change? I doubt it, but we will need to be intentional about the way we live with it.

Wading through this mess is Sam Anderson, whose recent article "In Defense of Distraction" in New York magazine is one of the most thoughtful approaches to the subject I've read to date. Alternately factual and philosophical, Anderson elevates the dialogue around this conversation into a higher place where something really productive is possible. Merlin Mann and the Dali Lama make guest appearances (though not together).

The thing I appreciate most about this piece is the way Anderson takes a thoughtful approach to the topic without ignoring any piece of it. He doesn't pretend like the internet isn't going to do a lot to change the way we live, but he's not decrying the downfall of humanity either. What Anderson does instead is honestly address all of the popular fears - that our ability to focus is being destroyed, that we get nothing done, that the internet is to blame - while recognizing that technology always changes humanity, and that this isn't necessarily bad.

One of my favorite parts:

Before the founders of Google had even managed to get themselves born, the polymath economist Herbert A. Simon wrote maybe the most concise possible description of our modern struggle: “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” As beneficiaries of the greatest information boom in the history of the world, we are suffering, by Simon’s logic, a correspondingly serious poverty of attention…

Here's another good one, near the end:

…Focus is a paradox—it has distraction built into it. The two are symbiotic; they’re the systole and diastole of consciousness. Attention comes from the Latin “to stretch out” or “reach toward,” distraction from “to pull apart.” We need both. In their extreme forms, focus and attention may even circle back around and bleed into one other. Meyer says there’s a subset of Buddhists who believe that the most advanced monks become essentially “world-class multitaskers”—that all those years of meditation might actually speed up their mental processes enough to handle the kind of information overload the rest of us find crippling.

I learned a lot from reading the article - not just from a perspective of reflection, but also hard facts that will change the way I approach multi-tasking. For instance, I didn't realize that multi-tasking itself is a myth. My brain is physically only capable of processing one thing at a time, and rapidly switching between them causes an efficiency loss every time I try. I think ever since the idea of dual-core computers became popular, nerds like myself have been secretly hoping for a way to hack our consciousness into separate parts capable of true threading. Glad to know that's off the table.

If you haven't made the jump already I feel I should tell you that this is a pretty long article in full, but it's well worth the time it takes to read it. Part of learning to live in a world of distractions is intentionally creating space away from them - turning off Twitter, ignoring IM. Maybe use one of your intentional times, even if it's the only one you have this week, to read this article, and see if it doesn't change your perspective on your digital lifestyle.

Read more from RJ Owen.