How can we focus with all the digital noise

March 17, 2024
Hello, Hive! I haven't written a full article in a while. I had a really busy week. Even with my busy schedule, I get a lot of distractions. Digital distractions to be exact.

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Information Age

They say it's the information age. True, in today's time, information can be accessed with a few taps of the fingers. As technology continuously improves, the Internet speed grows faster and faster. The technology can help us improve our productivity.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

However, while having information almost instantly has a great deal of advantages, these advantages do not come without its downside. Namely, the Internet also brings a lot of Digital Noise!

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Hello, Hive! I haven't written a full article in a while. I had a really busy week. Even with my busy schedule, I get a lot of distractions. Digital distractions to be exact.

In this post I will share with you some of the digital noise that commonly causes distractions, my struggles against them, and how I got over some of them ...

I admit though that I don't have the perfect solution to this comment predicament. Thus I'd like to ask for your own experience and how you handled the digital noise by sharing them in the comment section.

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Age of Digital Noise!

A busy highway and I mean the physical highway, is noisy. The roaring engines of speeding vehicles are loud. Similarly, the so-called "Information Superhighway" is filled with noise! Noise that can easily distract us from focusing on our work

A lot of this noise comes along with what we deem "useful" platforms.

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• Facebook and other social media. A lot of people scroll through their social media walls mindlessly. Some spend maybe a few minutes at a time, and some of them do it for hours. And what do they get?
  They may get some updates about their friends, some news, and other things, but Facebook is one of the biggest media that brings a lot of noise!

  • I have reduced my Facebook time. However, I still sometimes spend more time than necessary on Instagram. Lately, I cut down the accounts that I follow to the more "useful ones".

• Fake News and Unverifiable Information - The Internet is the cheapest way to spread news. The problem is, that a lot of fake news and unverifiable information (thus could be fake) is spreading like wildfire.

  • Fortunately, by cutting down my Facebook time, I have also reduced the fake news that I receive.

• Flame Wars - people love to express their hate through social media! And people love to read and react... often fanning the flame. Hey! It's an interactive novel in the making!

• Pornography - aside from the rated pornographic sites, there are platforms where girls voluntarily display or flash their private parts or at least do some erotic dance for a few virtual rewards. (I think they can cash in those rewards). Some of them are doing it on Facebook and IG. Worse is, these are easily accessible to minors these days.

• Streaming Movie and TV Shows - Entertainment companies have switched to streaming services. Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, and a lot more companies are streaming countless movies and TV shows.

  • I admit this is where I waste a lot of my time. Instead of watching one episode of a title per week, I'd end up watching the whole season within a week.

• Mobile Games - I guess the number one distractor for most of us. Mobile games such as Mobile Legends, Minecraft, and my personal favorite. "Last Day on Earth" is supposed to divert us temporarily to help relieve stress. But most players end up playing almost the whole day.

  • I'm proud to admit though, that while the games are still on my device, I haven't touched any of them for months... except for the offline Chess game which I play once in a while.

How can we focus on all the digital noise?

What I mentioned above are just some of the digital noise that we encounter commonly on the Internet. This noise can easily distract us from our tasks. So how can we focus on all the digital noise?

The steps I have taken so far are minimizing my time with certain social media. If Facebook Messenger is not used in our workplace for communication, I would delete that app once and for all. But I can't do that for now.

What I did though is I disabled the Facebook and Messenger notifications in the settings.

I also monitor my screen time.

How About You?

How about you? What's your biggest distractor? How did you deal or how are you dealing with the digital noise? Care to share it with us?

Thank you.

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Post No. 2024-18
Date Posted: March q7, 2024.
All Images used are mine unless otherwise indicated
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