The Blur—Is It Harming Our Ability To Focus?

 Once upon a time, fall was the dividing line between summer vacation and school. Now most schools resume in August, nipping at summer’s heels. This divide has been blurred, if not erased. In the white-collar world, weekends and vacations were once held sacrosanct, a time for family, friends, and rejuvenation, not to be interrupted except for a true emergency. Now I see my nieces and nephews tethered to their jobs nights, weekends and vacation days by cell phones and laptops. The divide between their work lives and private lives has vanished.

Do shorter summer breaks make our young students smarter? Does the inability to escape professional demands for short time periods make us more productive?

Perhaps I’m just not good at multi-tasking. Maybe it’s a defect that I long for those old-time borders that are not crossed without good reason. As an author, I wish peer and publisher expectations would give writers a little more slack to disappear from social media for weeks at a time to write. Perhaps then the promotion, when it comes, would be more exuberant, more creative. But it’s now considered a no-no for authors to hibernate for weeks (and certainly not months) to focus on drafting or fine-tuning a manuscript. To be successful, we’re told we must spend time every day—or at least several times a week—on social networking and promotion.  And, if we do take a creative sabbatical or vacation, we must apologize for our absence on social media, our failure to re-tweet, share posts, comment on blogs.

I just attended a Writers Police Academy (a terrific experience), and one of the speakers was Dr. Katherine Ramsland, a forensic psychologist and the author of more than 40 books, many relating to how our minds work. In her presentation, Dr. Ramsland said only one percent of people can genuinely multitask. What's more, she noted that habitual attempts at multitasking can damage our ability to focus and concentrate.

Since I'm writing a blog, I obviously believe in participating in social media. However, how much time should be devoted to it is a question I need to answer. How many of you (authors or other professionals) would like to disconnect from social media for a stretch of time—with no apologies—to concentrate on creative endeavors? If this is one of your daydreams, what’s stopping you? Would your networking/promotional efforts truly suffer if you took the occasional sabbatical?