The Hierarchy Of Digital Distractions [Chart]

I know this chart wasn’t originally created to be funny, but it’s definitely a funny topic for me. I have a hard time managing my distractions during the day. I can be working on a few things (always multitasking), then take a phone while tweeting and facebooking, then based on the phone call switch over to something else (while watching YouTube videos) and by the end of the day, I might eventually get back to my original projects. Maybe. If I’m lucky. Since I have my business phone forwarded to my iPhone most of the time, it’s almost constantly ringing, and it beeps every time I get a Twitter DM. Oh, and I keep music on all the time too. Yeah, it’s nuts around here. A lot of days I forget to eat lunch. Richard sends me DMs to remind me to focus.

I’m not avoiding my work when I give into distractions. I love what I do. My number one biggest distraction is no doubt Twitter. Since I consider Twitter to be such a positive happy place to hang out during the day, it’s easy for me to justify all the time I spend there. Then of course there is Facebook, Google+, Skype, email, text, and the list goes on and on. That’s not even counting the non-digital distractions and driving distractions we face each day. What’s your biggest distraction? Misty wrote an article called 5 Ways To Overcome Distractions which helped me. At the end of the day though, I know that those distractions are what make me feel alive, so I’m okay with them.

According to Moma, the creator of this chart, David McCandless, “used his own experience to create a pyramid diagram of the interferences constantly gnawing at our attention span in this socially networked, data-consuming world.” I can’t help but wonder what it will be like in twenty years from now. With all the advances in augmented reality, we will most likely be bombarded with distractions hundreds of times greater then than we are now. Perhaps by then, we’ll be so used to them, they won’t be considered distractions at all anymore. Actually, the more I think about it, we might have less distractions in the future. I remember writing Utopian Future: The Internet Connects Everything with an infographic that showed how technology will advance to the point where all of our things are connected together and communicating with one another. In other words, our involvement in it all might be less instead of more. Hmm… That sounds kinda creepy, doesn’t it?