Digital Distractions in High School

The front page of today’s New York Times has a long article by Matt Richtel about the difficulty of keeping high school students focused on their academic work when they’re so distracted by texting their friends, playing videogames, exploring you-tube and other digital entertainments. It’s a growing problem that’s been observed at every level. My book Conquer CyberOverload stresses the impacts in the workplace, but I’ve also been giving workshops to college students to help them overcome digital distractions by understanding how their brains process information when they’re multitasking or experiencing information overload. I’m convinced this is a problem that can be solved only by changing attitudes about how the mind spends its time; no authority figure can force kids to wean themselves away, at least at times, from the technology that they’ve grown up with and love.