This article is being written exactly one hour before its deadline to my editor. I started working on it Sunday afternoon and again late that night but to no avail. Procrastination would be put in the lineup as one of the usual suspects, but in this case I’m not quite certain. It’s fascinating how quickly one can become distracted while working online. Multitasking has become the death of us. A professor of mine once said, “Sure, you kids can multitask, but most of you suck at it,” while referring to the students who were surfing the Internet during one of his lectures.

Let me know if you’ve found yourself in this situation before: “I need to write a paper, but I need some background noise so I don’t go insane. Oh I know, I’ll put on a show from Netflix!” (Netflix running, you sit down at your computer to start work on your paper and you hear your phone go off.) “I bet this text is urgent!”

Come back to this situation a half an hour later to find that you haven’t even started the paper. But every one of your friends has been texted, Facebook has been checked, all of your emails have been read and the front page of reddit.com has been surfed. In some sort of irony this entire article was inspired by a picture I found on imgur.com of a guy showing off how distracted he was by his TV, phone and computer. It’s fascinating how our tools of productivity can slow us down to a screeching halt.

Right now I have the following tabs open: Facebook, Gmail, Pandora, imgur and a few news websites. Not to mention Skype and Google Talk both have me set to online and available. Why do I need any of those right now? I’m sure I could come up with one or two reasons, as could you, but the point is, if you want to accomplish something and accomplish it well, you need to maintain some level of focus. I feel like students’ learning and productivity at school, various businesses and in people’s personal lives are completely hindered by the constant distractions that our devices have brought to us.

I overheard someone talking about dating tips the other day, and one of the tips was to turn off your cell phone while your date is watching to show them they have your complete attention. You know distractions have taken over your life when you can’t go on a date without texting, checking in on Foursquare, updating Twitter and checking email all at the same time. Even in the workplace, tools such as instant messaging have become common place, in essence doubling your distractions during the work day.

The definition of noise is “any unwanted sound,” and that’s exactly what we have. I suggest taking some time out of your day to turn everything off. Have some “you” time and do so in silence. You’ll be surprised by the amount of thinking and how easy it is to organize your thoughts. Don’t worry, you can still post about it on Facebook later.