My Problem With Tabs

They’re a reminder of how overwhelmingly scattered the mind can be.

But apparently, tabs make us feel good.

I asked a friend to help me with a little experiment. I wanted to find out:

1. How long it would take to become distracted from a task
2. What our distractions were
3. Our reflections about these distractions

The task would be undertaken on our laptop. We tried to replicate the setting of any ordinary task we’d be doing on a weekday afternoon. The agreed task was homework in the bedroom. It was simple: we’d use a camera to record our activity. That recording would be used as a source to analyse what kinds of things we got up to instead of our homework. The task would take 30 minutes.

Like my tabs, the number of devices present at one time is often one too many (source).

Why 30 minutes?

It takes about 11 minutes to get distracted. This is according to digital distraction researcher, Gloria Mark.

Mark also concludes that on average, it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to ‘recover’ from distraction (2008). That’s 11 minutes to get distracted and another 20 or so to stop. We were certain we’d be distracted in no time. Hence, 30 minutes was considered an appropriately rounded time frame for us to lose focus…and maybe regain it.

We considered a ‘distraction’ to be a thing that deviated from our original task. It was anything that had no correlation with what we were trying to complete. Something like looking up a definition of a word in an article wasn’t considered a distraction.

I decided to start my 30 minutes by reading an article I’d emailed to myself. I have endless self-sent articles. My first challenge was scrolling through my ’33 unread’ inbox. I knew I was experimenting on myself, and so I thought about what course of action I would normally take in this all-too-frequent situation. That action would be to delete all promotional emails — these are items from concert venues, magazine companies, social media, etc. Inboxes can be a messy place. I could’ve gone further with the tedious process of unsubscribing from each and every one — but not this time. I was on a mission to find that article.

How long until distraction

My unrealising path of distraction arrived at around 10 minutes in. This so far lines up with Mark’s 11-minute proposal. Upon watching the video, it looked like at this point I’d forgotten about being recorded. The source of distraction was a ‘ping!’ orchestrated by my phone. It was a reminder to check a particular email. To my great convenience, the tab for my email was still open. That’s distraction number 2 leading to distraction number 3.

It only took my friend 5 minutes to meet their first distraction. It was the one and only Facebook tab. They considered it an “automatic thing” — a reflexive move each time their browser is opened.

What were the distractions

The rest of the experiment followed a similar route for each of us. Here is our combined list of distractions:

• using a mobile phone
• opening a Facebook tab
• streaming music
• leaving our seat (most likely for food)
• clicking ‘related’ links which weren’t so related to our task

Neither of us completed our original tasks within the 30 minutes. There was no ‘recovery’. What does this say about our attention spans?

Screenshot of Google search: “define multitask”

How we feel about distractions

Wang attributes media multitasking to emotional gratification. It is said that “the combination of activities accounts for the good feelings obtained” (2012). My friend and I discussed this — was that our motive for multitasking? We agreed that it wasn’t ‘efficiency’ we felt in our use of multiple tabs and technology. The feeling was closer to worry and boredom — we worried about missing important information *checks email*, and we were simply bored of the task at hand *opens Facebook tab*. The result is an overwhelming direction of distractions.

We both consider multitasking a mode of distraction. Intentional distraction. The best word for it is procrastination.

I suppose multitasking can be efficient for some. The results of Mark’s study suggest that constant interruption (like the ‘ping!’ phone reminder) leads to a change in working rhythms, coping strategies and mental states. In such cases, the distraction is compensated for by faster performance and a more stressful working style. I haven’t quite become accustomed to these things, leaving my distractions a mode of procrastination.

I’ve been to the point where I could no longer read the titles of each tab. It is not a pretty sight.

Being ‘lost in thought’ – may be pretty, but not so practical. (source)

References:

Grabmeier, J 2012, Multitasking May Hurt Your Performance, But It Makes You Feel Better, Ohio State University Research and Innovation Communications, viewed 26 September 2015, <http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/multitask.htm&gt;.

Mark, G Gudith, D & Klocke, U 2008, ‘The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress’, in CHI 2008 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, 5-10 April, viewed 26 September 2015, <https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf&gt;.