A story on the front of the Washington Post recently stopped me dead in my tracks. A mom lamented that her teen daughter was so addicted to text messaging on her cell phone that she'd counted 6,473 texts that her daughter had sent and received in just one month, which boiled down 200 messages a day, or ten per waking hour. So every six minutes or so, this young woman stopped whatever she was doing to type "LOL" or "OK" or "GTG" to a friend instead of finishing homework, talking to her family members, practicing her instrument or reading a book without interruption.
As a goal accomplishment coach, I'm staggered by the number of times we often find ourselves being pulled off course to text someone, "tweet" on twitter, answer a phone call, update our relationship status, attend to a Blackberry, or get beeped off course. Add that to the time we spend attending to requests from friends on Facebook to join new causes, take tests, write on their walls or "poke" them. My husband looked up in shock from Facebook recently to say that his entire high school football team was now on Facebook and that films from games in the 1970s were being uploaded, and messages were flying fast and furious that he felt compelled to respond to every few hours. "I can't get off this site!" he wailed.
I understand that technology is something that can be very helpful in getting a message out, branding ourselves, gathering followers or staying connected, but I also see the dark side of all of these advances. So I caution my clients about mistaking this type of technological activity for productivity if they have goals to accomplish that require sustained focus and grit. Procrastination experts agree, saying that technological distractions are partly responsible for the rising levels of anxiety and depression among college students, who end up so distracted by bids for their attention that they procrastinate about work deadlines, fueling anxiety and depression in the process.
This is exactly why I'm staying away from Twitter, which one of my colleagues likened to falling into a big, black hole that prevents her from being productive. If you "tweet" on Twitter, you are either commenting about what other people are doing, or you are commenting about something you are going to do, but you are not actually doing it yet. What good is an endless stream of commentary about intentions to do something, or comments about other people's actions if you're not actually staying focused on your own tasks, if you even have any? How can there be any forward progress when you have to stop and announce yourself over and over? The simple answer is that there can't be.
One of the enemies of goal accomplishment is the ability to delay gratification, and experts say that the yelp of technology is continuously undermining our ability to do this. If we don't have the patience to listen to a phone message and must see a text message right away, or we can't wait to hear how a concert was and we need to be "tweeted" during the performance, instead, how will we ever develop and nurture willpower, which self-regulation experts cite as the key muscle in goal accomplishment? If everything is NOW and not LATER, why would anyone wait for anything good? Whatever happened to the virtue of patience?
For all of these reasons, I will only check Facebook every few weeks and I refuse to update my status every hour on the site. I will write my columns, books and newsletters instead of constantly "tweeting" about my intentions to do so. I will turn off my Blackberry during meals and car rides and avoid the "absent present" phenomenon that means you are present in body, but absent to those around you because you are preoccupied with cutting-edge technology. And chances are I'm going to get a little bit more done than if I constantly announced that I was going to get something done, and then replied to people who had thoughts about that, too.
Am I a twit for not twittering? I think not, but am open to arguments otherwise.
