I’ve been struggling with a growing problem lately; an inability to concentrate on a task. It’s particularly frustrating for me as I have spent a large portion of my career ‘noodling’ through large, complex problems and creating the systems to bring organization to chaos, efficiency to randomness and value where none existed.

I initially thought that it was due to my work environment. I am the only technology-centric person on my company and therefore receive a constant stream of ‘My computer is doing something wierd…’ interruptions in my day. That, coupled with numerous development projects active a given time have split my time into increasingly smaller increments of focus. So much so in fact that I’ve restructured my work scheduled to spend 3 days a week working from home to remove the ‘interruptions’.

It’s not working.

Granted, this is only my second week of the new schedule but I still find myself flitting between projects, email, IM, phone calls, not to mention household chores that are now only 3 steps away from being done. This post is a good example. During the course of writing these few paragraphs I have checked email twice, responded to an IM and attended to iTunes a few times to adjust my music.

I had thought it was an overabundance of input, too many interesting courses for my mind to pursue. My interests span a wide spectrum and I have the desire to explore them all. I felt that I lacked the discipline to focus on any given one for an extended length of time.

Turns out, I may be able to blame the Internet:

The Atlantic Online | July/August 2008 | Is Google Making Us Stupid? | Nicholas Carr

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.