Technology, procrastination

ree NO ONE is walking along busy streets without his cellular phone placed inside his pocket or held by his hand. Many people also resort to looking for their great buys online instead of exhausting themselves in crowded shopping malls. And you can’t allow a day to pass without opening your Facebook account.

This is it. You likely can’t get through a day without engaging yourselves to technology. You see drivers rushing down thoroughfares while shuffling through text messages and people conversing with one another while headsets are attached to their ears.

Is this thing called technology’s overstimulation? Does it affect our ability to focus to more important functions of the day?

Adam Gazzaley, professor of neurology at the University of California, explains in one of his articles that technology has grown so fast that it challenges “our cognitive control system at its very core.” He says that cognitive control is our “ability to focus on accomplishing a task in the context of competing demands. Essentially, the more demands, the more difficult it is to focus.”

In schools, how can a teacher or a student concentrate to the lessons of the day if his or her cellphone is buzzing or a new Facebook message

ro is burning his or her ear, it’s going to be a little challenging to focus. Gazzaley also added that “our brains are very sensitive to external interference by both irrelevant distractions and multitasking.”

In this case, we need to be a bit careful in our interaction with technology. If there are more important things that we need to attend to with high-quality attention, we need to reduce distractions and set ourselves to focus mode. In this mode, we don’t usually procrastinate or allow the things to be accomplished for the day to be done tomorrow.

A recently posted video on “Lifehacker” attempts to explain why we procrastinate when we’re overstimulated by a certain technology. The video says that it feels more rewarding to our brain to enjoy an online video than it is to work on a project or report.

In this light therefore, we need to have a conscious effort to balance everything. We have what it is called freewill and choice. If we want to be more productive in a day, choose and decide to give much attention to more important tasks rather than engaging so much of our time manipulating and playing with our gadgets or the so- called techno-burdens. ( Paid article)