Have you ever gone into a room to do something, seen something else and ended up doing the dishes, cleaning the kitchen, and while you’re looking out the window you notice that the lawn needs to be mowed? After mowing the lawn, you realize you need to rake the leaves as well. Before long, you’re standing in the yard with a rake in your hand and have completely forgotten why you went into the kitchen to begin with.
This happens to me all the time. Too many plates spinning and only so much attention I can give to each one.
I sit down at the computer to accomplish one thing. While doing it, I notice something else. That requires Google. Google produces seventeen tabs. One tab reminds me of something I wanted to do with a Raspberry Pi. Forty five minutes later I’m SSH’d into a computer somewhere in the house and have absolutely no idea what I originally sat down to accomplish.
Whatever it was, I’m sure it was important.
Probably.
The problem is that I like figuring shit out. If I encounter something I don’t understand, there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to investigate it. Unfortunately, the internet has made this incredibly easy and incredibly dangerous. There was a time when answering a random question required finding a book, asking somebody who knew more than you, or simply accepting that you might never know.
Now I can type the question into Google.
Three hours later I know how hydroelectric dams work, I’ve watched a guy in Finland repair a forty year old radio, there’s a Raspberry Pi accessory in my Amazon cart, and I still haven’t answered the email I originally sat down to write.
This isn’t limited to computers.
Photography practically encourages distraction. I can go somewhere intending to photograph one thing and notice something completely different. The light is hitting a tree in an interesting way. There’s a reflection I hadn’t noticed. Somebody is doing something thirty feet away that suddenly seems much more interesting than whatever I was pointing the camera at.
I get distracted. Sometimes that’s where the photograph is.
Geocaching may be even worse. I’ll be going somewhere with an actual purpose, open the app and discover there’s a cache nearby. Nearby is a dangerous word in geocaching. It can mean two blocks away. It can also apparently mean twelve miles in the opposite direction down a road you’ve never traveled.
I’ve already established that this behavior once led me to a hidden waterfall on the Oregon Coast, so I have evidence that occasionally ignoring what I was supposed to be doing works out pretty damn well.
Of course, that’s the problem. Sometimes distraction rewards me.
If every distraction ended with three wasted hours and a lawn mower sitting in the driveway, I’d probably get better at avoiding them. Instead, every once in a while I stumble onto something genuinely interesting. I learn something. I fix something. I find a place I didn’t know existed. I get a photograph I wasn’t looking for.
That is terrible reinforcement for someone like me.
I also have a lot of things competing for my attention. Photography. Work. Radios. Geocaching. Raspberry Pis. The blog. Whatever project seemed like a brilliant idea fifteen minutes ago. My brain doesn’t always arrange these things into a nice orderly line and wait for me to finish one before presenting the next.
They all show up at the counter at the same fucking time.
I’ve tried lists. Lists help.
The problem is that occasionally making the list becomes its own project.
Then I need a better way to organize the list. Maybe there’s an app. Obviously I should research the apps. None of them quite work the way I want.
I wonder if I could build one. And there goes the afternoon.
I suppose I could look at all of this as something I need to fix. There are certainly times when I need to put the blinders on and finish the thing in front of me. Bills generally don’t appreciate curiosity. Clients probably aren’t interested in hearing that their photographs aren’t finished because I discovered a fascinating Linux problem. There are things that require my full attention, whether my brain wants to give it or not.
But I don’t think I want to eliminate distraction entirely.
Some of the more interesting things in my life have happened because something off to the side caught my attention.
Photography itself started because something caught my attention.
Geocaching has taken me places I never intended to go.
Computers and radios have sent me down countless rabbit holes where I learned things I didn’t know I wanted to learn.
Even writing this blog has worked that way. One thought leads to another, which reminds me of a story, which somehow turns into tomorrow’s word.
There’s probably a reasonable middle ground between staying completely focused and wandering through life like a Labrador that just spotted a squirrel.
I’m still working on that part. For now, I should probably finish writing this. Then I need to figure out what I originally sat down at the computer to do.
Right after I check the Raspberry Pi.