When I’m writing in my blog or doing school work I usually need to have relative silence. Many will listen to their iPods or watch television but lately I’m not able to handle the distraction of noise, be it music, television, airplanes, thunderstorms, whatever, while I’m concentrating on a task.
I find this relatively new development to be surprising. Before working for the telephone company, I worked for a radio station where there is constantly fifty things going on at once. People are walking in and out of the studio as you’re talking on the air, phones need to be answered while you’re loading up the next CD and thinking about what happens next and the radio is obviously constantly on while you’re doing your work. When I went to the telephone company, there was an unspoken rule that “music shall not be heard within these walls” in the tech support center I worked in, so the only sounds one heard was the ringing of telephones, little murmurs of conversation, a network trouble signal that sounded like an air-raid siren and the occasional f-bombs from nearby co-workers. Compared to the radio station, the telephone company was pretty quiet.
Now I find myself easily distracted by noise.
I can’t write in my blog if Earl has music going on his computer. The cat is constantly trying to jockey a spot on my lap to the point where I have begun locking him out of the room when I’m trying to work and I’m falling behind on my podcast listening because I’m spending more time on the computer doing actual work so I can’t concentrate and listen at the same time.
So with it being springtime and the ensuing changes (“My you look much younger without your mustache!” was a common theme at school today), I have begun “distraction training”, where I listen to music and do a given task at the same time.
If my blog entries are a little more incoherent than usual you’ll know why.
