Attention

My blog entries are too short. Over the last year or more my entries have gotten shorter and shorter. This is due not to the lack of thing to say, but the lack of willingness to sit down and think things out while putting them down. My attention span has shortened to about five minutes for the deepest of thoughts.

I watched a show on hulu last night about a collage class for anthropology. They had a running joke that watching YouTube videos was a good way to study current trends in civilization. In one of the podcasts I heard today, there was a joke about making class times as long as a YouTube video to keep people's attention. This is more true than any one in charge is willing to admit.

My job is not helping. I get torn from one project to another every five minutes. I'll be restaging three machines simultaneously while researching hard drives and laptop batteries online for replacing existing systems. It is just a normal thing.

I'm frighteningly bad at multitasking. I do not even believe that humans are capable of multitasking. They are only able to do one thing at a time. The illusion of multitasking comes from switching from one thing to another. This adds overhead to the process making things worse. Real art and true craftsmanship comes from someone doing one thing at a time. Doing it well. Then doing the next thing. This makes for quality.

I'll never have written anything longer than one of these blog entries without the ability to concentrate on one subject for longer than five or ten minutes. That is just not how writing is done. You write. You fix. You fix some more. You fix some more yet. You start over. Then, you get to go to the next paragraph. It is maddening and a tedious process. Not every one works that way. I'll have to.

Now, how do I fix this defect? Well, I need to exorcise the thinking muscle on long term projects. I have no ability to stick with things over the long haul. I need to fix this too. I may need to stop with the whole Notes crap that I put on this blog. Either expand on those entries or save them in a file somewhere for seed ideas.

How many times a year do I go through this same effort? I must have to kick my self in the pants three times a year. Yee-gads. I'm a mess.