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by dingusdew 1059 days ago
It's not enough to just base this on screens. It's also workplace environments.

Even something as "simple" as working in a pizza place, say Domino's, is increasingly a frantic assembly line where orders can come at a breakneck pace through internet applications.

You'll still be working somewhere perpetually understaffed and who give you basically no training, but expect you to pay attention to multiple threads at once, all day long. You're a delivery driver, but you're also expected to do kitchen prep, take phone orders, take in-person orders, do dishes, cut and box pizzas, help on the prep line and generally be on-call for anything else needed to be done in the store.

When your workflow is literally constantly being interrupted by other parts of the workflow, because you're always expected to be paying attention to multiple parts of the workflow, you lose the ability to focus on just one thing for an extended period.

Anyway, that's my two cents, it's not just social media, phones and screens. It's also a way of life in America, to be expected to manage numerous expectations all at once and always be on your feet moving. If you can't do it, you're likely to lose your (shitty) job, so forcing yourself to be able to focus on numerous things at once without giving your whole focus to one thing is literally pounded into your head in your workplace.

3 comments

I’d somewhat agree that culturally we just don’t value sustained single task work anymore. If you can’t multitask 15 things then you’re useless.
... even though the myth of multitasking had already been debunked many times over. I agree with you; It's a sad state of affairs.
Even financially we have decimated entire fields because they were single task.
Yep. I worked at a software shop where they liked for developers to have roughly 6 projects simultaneous at any time. The constant context-switching drove me insane. By the I time I 'loaded into mental RAM' all the context for one project, it was time for a meeting about another project.

For an attention deficit programmer maybe this is a bonus. Not for me. I like to focus in on the task, take notes, figure it out, and get it out the door and off my plate. I don't like to nibble on code.

Most jobs don't allow for deep focus or long-term thinking. How do we expect people to be good at it without practice while we encourage the opposite behavior.