Driven to Distra-Wait, What Was I Saying?

You may recall an article I wrote a little bit ago where I talked about how I am still connecting my undergrad education with real world issues. This is a second article in a series about how I can still connect my education with every day issues. See the first article here.
One of my professors used to advise against succumbing to the temptation to multitask. She loved to remind all of us students that studies have proven there is no such thing as multitasking for humans. There is, however, sequential tasking. Meaning we can do things in a sequence, sometimes in rather quick succession, and fool ourselves into thinking we’re multitasking.
I don’t believe we can multitask, I think the societal pressure to do more in less time pushes people to multitask, thereby rearing the head of multitasking’s ugly twin sister named distraction.

Lately I have noticed that I can’t go anywhere without seeing a multitasking, distracted person. Be it someone who is on their cell phone in the movie theater while the previews play, someone texting and driving, or someone playing on their iPhone, Kindle, or other electronic device to avoid looking the world in the face.
It seems like us a lot of us are on the same wavelength, particularly in the blogging world. Leo Babauta of the blog Zen Habits recently released the e-book focus about distractions, multitasking and how to slow down in this fast-paced world.
Our world is spinning so fast, in fact, advertising studies show that our attention spans are getting shorter, I recently read an article that touted this the era of the 15 second commercial, replacing the superfluous 30 second ad. You can read up about the shortened ads here.
While I obviously don’t have all the answers on how to do less, pay attention more and slow down, I do know that it is a subject that means a lot to me. Life in general seems to have sped up exponentially since I graduated from college four years ago. I know I am personally on a quest to slow down, and simple living goes hand in hand with a slowed down, less frenzied lifestyle.
I’ll be revisiting the subject of slowing down again within the next few weeks, particularly about an amazing book I read that changed my life called ‘In Praise of Slowness’ by Carl Honore.