The Quest for a Quiet Mind

Its fourth period, about 10:45 in the morn­ing. I have been at school for about three and a half hours and taught three classes. I ease into my desk chair as the last of my stu­dents file out of the room and into the hall­way, with a mind for being as pro­duc­tive as pos­si­ble in the 40 min­utes I have with­out stu­dents. I no sooner uncap my trusty pen to begin mark­ing, when my email alert chimes and I begin to read it. As I begin to read the email that has come in while I was teach­ing, Tweet­deck con­ve­niently alerts me to a new batch of tweets from the peo­ple I fol­low. It turns out that there are some really inter­est­ing links in those tweets, which of course I click.

You get the idea. Soon, the plans that I had for the period have gone by the way­side and stu­dents are once again pour­ing into the room.

Cer­tainly the pos­i­tive and detri­men­tal effects of multi-tasking have been dis­cussed, and there is no doubt that in this case my pro­duc­tiv­ity has been dimin­ished. But today I made an obser­va­tion about myself that I found alarm­ing: its not just that I can’t just do one thing at a time any more, I can’t even just think of one thing at a time any more. Lately I have been catch­ing myself check­ing email or Twit­ter while I am play­ing with my two year old son. I fre­quently will have mul­ti­ple appli­ca­tions run­ning on my lap­top while I am watch­ing the tele­vi­sion. What’s worse is that even if I am not actu­ally doing some­thing else, I am think­ing of doing some­thing else. This issue reached a tip­ping point for me today when I caught my mind wan­der­ing to a future pre­sen­ta­tion while a stu­dent was deliv­er­ing a speech in my class.

What hap­pened to the quiet mind?

Some­thing has changed in my mind, and I would be will­ing to bet that this is hap­pen­ing to oth­ers. I was once able to focus on a novel deeply enough to become com­pletely immersed in it for hours. I have a dis­tinct mem­ory of read­ing Thomas Har­ris’ Han­ni­bal in eigh­teen hours, stop­ping only for emer­gen­cies. Now I feel anx­ious after thirty min­utes, won­der­ing if there is some­thing else that I should be doing, or my mind wan­ders to a blog post or web­site that I have recently seen. What does this have to do with edu­ca­tion you might ask? Well, I am 34 years old. The Inter­net was not a truly viable thing until I was a sopho­more in col­lege, and this has hap­pened to my mind. My stu­dents have never expe­ri­enced a world with­out it, will they ever know a quiet mind? But maybe because this is all they know they don’t miss it like I do. How can this knowl­edge affect my teach­ing? Are there cer­tain tech­niques that I can use and that I can teach my stu­dents to help with focus? Or per­haps it is me that needs to learn to cope with a mind filled with storms, and learn to effec­tively multi-task.

There are some soft­ware solu­tions out there to help you to con­cen­trate on sin­gle tasks, here are a few high­lights. All of these pro­grams are for the Mac, sorry Win­dows readers.

• Write­Room ($24.95): Write­Room is a word proces­sor that blacks out every­thing else on your com­puter screen. More than that, it only types. It won’t add bor­ders or images, it is min­i­mal­ist in the best way possible.
• Think (free): Think is sim­il­iar to Write­Room in the sense that it blacks out what you are not work­ing on, but it is not quite so sin­gle minded. While it is run­ning, Think will high­light your cur­rent appli­ca­tion but other appli­ca­tions are still allowed to intrude. Also, unlike Write­Room it does not elim­i­nate dis­trac­tions that occur within the application.
• Con­cen­trate ($29.00): Per­haps the most intense soft­ware of the bunch, Con­cen­trate will force you to con­cen­trate by set­ting time lim­its, and block­ing dis­trac­tions (set by you). You may also launch appli­ca­tions or web­pages from the soft­ware if you need them to accom­plish a par­tic­u­lar task.

Although these pro­grams offer excel­lent sup­port, the essen­tial ques­tion still remains: will any of these things quiet my mind?