Reading, Writing, and Your Smartphone

Delivering Better Content in a Deeply Distracted World

Imagine. It’s 8am in the morning and you haven’t even had your first cup of Joe. You’re thinking hard about your concept and copy for that new website that you sold the client on. After all this client is your biggest, ok your only client but the Muse hasn’t made her appearance yet. You feel like a cold-bolded, uninspired Gecko from the Mesozoic period. Nothing written on paper yet. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.  You’ve got to get something written. You’re determined not to let Covid stop you despite being mostly physically confined to your local neighborhood. After all you resiliently promised to deliver that website proposal to the client in a few days!

You decide to get that cup of Joe in fact to have two large cups then you amber back upstairs to take your shower — smart phone in tow. Buzz. Buzz. You get a smartphone notification from your favorite online content marketing magazine and notice a productivity article which also recommends a top book for marketers. Deep Work? What does that have to do with your trade you ponder. As a serious digital or marketing enthusiast needing to constantly deliver you begin to parse the article. You get so pulled in. You’re intrigued. As you sit there on the side of the tub you decide right then and there to e-mail the magazine’s editor. With an eye on potentially writing for the magazine you offer a full throated take on the articles presented and on the first chapter of the associated book being discussed, Deep Work. Yes you impulsively downloaded a digital copy of the book to see what all the fuss was about. Self improvement time! The Muse can catch up to you a bit later tonight regarding that website proposal! 

Well here’s my synopsis on said articles and book as these artifacts collectively may rank right up there with the value of your Adobe Suite and MailChimp subscriptions. The premise of the first article I have forgotten how to read is that the author has become a cynical reader due to things like the constant clicks, distracting blue links, and the rapid, twitter-like need to make points that are characteristic of our online world. That cynical style of reading, at least for him, has given rise to a cynical style of writing. This writer and author laments the effects of all of this rapid information on our cognition and deeper thinking and predicts that our old habits of reading could easily become antiquated altogether! Rich intellectually if not in outlook — there are surely many who realize the benefits of both paper and electronic reading depending on the task at hand. Never-the-less, this read is still solid and should not be forgotten.   

With the plethora of marketing information, organizations, infographics, gurus, podcasts and such the second article How to remember what you read is certainly germane to both marketers and content developers alike. One of the central points here is what your high school or college teacher English teacher probably told you: that you should be an active reader. This means actually writing in the margins of a book (you can do it!) and can mean building vivid mental pictures and mental links to help your recall. Here’s a memory gem from this author: Grab someone and teach what you have learned removing jargon and describing why the information is important. Can you walk through the author’s logic?  More prescriptive and practical in this distracted world, this read gets a thumbs up!

Is your smartphone the first thing you blindly reach for in the morning? Raise you hand. Have you ever taken your smartphone with you while on the “comfort station” — or thought about it? The third article, Having Your Smartphone Nearby Takes a Toll on Your Thinking importantly reminds and affirms what many may already know or suspect: that frequently interacting with our phones can significantly impair our ability to keep track of important tasks. This article, based largely on a research/intervention example, picks up the negative cognitive threads that were sewn in the first two articles. In this case the culprit is the ubiquitous smart phone that most us have by our sides on a daily basis. Got a critical task to do or copy to deliver ? Try — just try to put your smart phone in another room!

Although the Zoom, shut up and write article is based on how certain Australian PhD in students determined not to let Covid 19 stop them from writing formed online Shut Up and Write Time sessions to cope with ongoing doctorial writing challenges. The real point here is that anyone or group can collaboratively leverage this technique! In a Zoom environment the basic idea is to coordinate short, nonjudgmental writing sprints among group members while having flexibility in terms of what tasks are to be completed during the Shut Up and Write Time.  This idea seems to have merit especially in terms of planning for dedicated writing time and experiencing the associated accountability and group synergies however it’s non-judgmental approach may not necessarily be optimum in terms of the important feedback that especially new marketing folks and creatives sometimes need to improve their work before client review: “No …. I think your archaic, typewriter font undermines your otherwise, clean modern aesthetic”.  

Finally, the introduction and first chapter of Cal Newport’s book Deep Work, (Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World) fittingly anchors the productivity insights of the earlier articles by first instructively and credibly citing some of the “deep work” practitioners of history and then giving depth, scope, and context to the term itself. In the first chapter, Deep Work is Valuable, this Georgetown professor elucidates why deep work is so beneficial to what he describes as the Great Restructuring and our New Economy. Of particular interest to those of us that deliver content — for example marketers, writers, and designers — Cal convincingly suggests that as technology makes talent remotely and universally accessible only the deeply focused workers at the peak of the market will thrive while the rest will suffer.  For its initial historically grounded and broad intellectual argument for what a deep, committed, and a electronically distraction-free approach to productivity means to a consequential and financially lucrative career, this book definitely appears to be worth continued reading!

References

Duke, K., Bos, M., Gneezy, A., & Ward, A. (2018, June 14). Having Your Smartphone Nearby Takes a Toll on Your Thinking (Even When It’s Silent and Facedown). Retrieved January 31, 2021, from https://hbr.org/2018/03/having-your-smartphone-nearby-takes-a-toll-on-your-thinking

Frick, W. T. (2018, February 09). I have forgotten how to read. Retrieved January 31, 2021, from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/i-have-forgotten-how-toread/article37921379/

Heng, K., & Jeong, D. (2020, June 20). Zoom, shut up and write: How PhD students cope amid COVID-19. Retrieved January 31, 2021, from https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20200615132829535

How to Remember What You Read. (2020, April 14). Retrieved January 31, 2021, from https://fs.blog/2017/10/how-to-remember-what-you-read/

Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. New York City, New York: Grand Central Publishing.