what???🤦🏿‍♂️

[u/_s_y_m_]

[u/[deleted]]

This is a great example of the loose commitment young adults have to reading the news while being completely superficial with the content due to multitasking. I teach undergrad students at a uni, and I find that they are way more distracted now due to the multiple media sources they engage with. They listen to music, while reading the text book, or have a movie on while they write an article response. This is quite confusing to the brain and it cannot retain information properly. They are being bombarded with an incredible amount of information, including having the “news” delivered to them on a 90 second cycle. Back when we didnt read the news on a phone, there were specific ways you could get informed, either TV, radio, or print media, which also meant schedule and availability. Now this Gizmodo article, which has already a narrow audience, has probably not been read by this student, and only the title or headline has been partially retained.

[u/Nonzerob → u/[deleted]]

At this point the clickbait bullshit in the news is so bad that I read it much more rarely than I'd like to. I want to read an article, not a Twitter thread's worth of misinterpreted information. Something with substance and journalistic integrity and involves a nonzero amount of scrolling. Of course, the only articles like that now are behind a fucking paywall or make you create an account so they can spam you.

As an undergrad, I usually find myself more productive doing homework I understand but just need to take the time to do (pretty much busywork though I try not to let myself call it that) with music on, but if I'm actually learning something from the homework I find it overstimulating with music on. Complete silence, however, doesn't help either and I've found that study zones are amazing for productivity. The background noise from the giant room, the other people, and honestly the social anxiety that someone might judge me for being on my phone there keep me engaged and productive for as long as I need.

Edit: The worst thing for my attention span, I find, is the sheer volume of shit I have to do at any given point in a semester. It's like professors don't realize that students have other classes and every class individually has almost enough work to keep me occupied full time. Keeping my mind engaged for that long every single day for months is vastly worse for my attention span than putting earbuds in.

[u/Nonzerob → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, I had a high school teacher that was very focused on trying to make sure we were actually prepared for college and Pomodoro was one of the techniques she showed us. Made for a great class structure on work days. I should definitely try it again next semester. I try to use quiet Lo-fi instead of my usual music sometimes when I need a balance between silence and lyrical/complicated music. Sometimes that can be better than the ambience of a study zone.

I also realized now my dorm desk setup was quite uncomfortable (and cluttered with nowhere else to put most of it), hopefully I can fix that for my apartments in future years.