A looming deadline.

Tweets, Facebook statuses, emails, IMs, texts, you name it. My attention goes there when it should be on the task at hand. Oh, and let’s not forget it’s less than a week until Christmas and my mind is all over the place thinking of holiday preparations.

And I’m sleep deprived. #oneyearold

This is what our kids experience, day in and day out. They’re not going to just be able to filter out the noise because we tell them it’s essential to their productivity.

They’re going to need to learn how to cope with it. They need to learn how to navigate in and out of digital spaces, some social, others not. To determine how their time should be spent. To know when to power on, for how long, when to take breaks, and how to take them.

Powering down isn’t always the answer. I need the resources I find online to complete most of my project work. I need access.

So it’s a management issue. MY issue. It’s very personal, how we choose to engage with and navigate digital spaces.

Our district is going to start blocking YouTube for students in the new year because of the amount of bandwidth being consumed at our MS/HS campus streaming high-def music videos.

My first thought was, Why are those kids watching YouTube all day? Why aren’t they working?

Those kids are consuming. But maybe while doing so, they’re also producing.

What tips do you have for focusing your attention? For paying attention? For developing your attention literacies?

Rheingold is my go-to resource on attention and digital literacies. I blogged about paying attention awhile back.