This post is part of a series of posts covering the topic of personal Calling & Vocation.  You can find more about the entire series in the archive on the Vocation & Calling page. More on this here.  Summary: We live in a time called the "Information Age".  The amount of information around us is increasing exponentially.  With more information available to us in any given day, we become overloaded.  The overload knowledge workers face is most often dealt with in a way that is unhealthy.  By trying to focus on a million things at once, workers effectively focus on nothing at all. Response: Focus.  Focus is the ability to concentrate on a single task for a given period of time.   One thing that seems very apparent to me is my lack of focus.  Though not officially diagnosed, I would consider it a form of ADHD.  Now, I wasn't ADHD as a child, I would sit and read for hours at a time.  I believe the ADHD started in college, when I first got my own computer and PDA.  I would use AvantGo to download Slashdot to my PDA and read it during a boring lecture.  As I learned more about my now campus wide connectivity, I would increasingly work on more than one task during class when I could in order to multi-task effectively.  The more I could do at a single time, the higher my geek status rose and the happier I thought I was.  Then finals week would roll around.  I'd stay awake for 3 or 4 days straight in order to finish projects and inevitably crash for the next 3 or 4 days to let my body recover.  I ran into the wall of my own strength.  Given I was 19 and that wall was pushed higher by Mt. Dew, but it was still a wall.  I started to realize that two things were affecting the focus that I had lost.  First, I was trying to do too many things at once.  Second, I was letting myself become overwhelmed with a mountain of information that I perceived as being important. I saw my level of success as directly related to the number of things I could accomplish.  It followed that if I did more things at once, I'd accomplish more, raising my level of success.  This seems intuitive to an 18 year old who floated through youth and high school.  Yet, when examined, productivity actually falls when a person tries to multi-task.  A report recently came out that showed that a person's IQ drops 10 points when distracted by email.  This is a higher drop than when someone smokes pot. The second problem, information overload, is directly attributable to the rise of computers and the internet.  The internet has single-handedly changed the lives of many people.  The way we relate to the world, relate to others and consume information has been forever changed.  I believe this change has been good and bad.  It is good because the benefits technology brings are numerous.  It is bad because the people who use the internet don't know what they gave up.  This has happened in history numerous times and commonly comes with the invention of any new technology.  The internet has caused a great deal of the change that has brought about the Crisis of Vocation & Calling because people have forgotten the essentials of life that people took for granted before the internet.  For instance, when was the last time you sat down and didn't check your email for an entire week?  Now, if you can even remember a time you've done that, try to think of how you felt when you were unplugged.  What did you really lose?  Unless your business is tied to the online world, you probably lost very little.  You can still use a telephone to communicate, you could even write a letter to someone.  But you didn't, and you lost 10 IQ points. Now, I am very guilty of this very thing.  The last time I didn't even check my email for 7 days straight was my honeymoon.  The only reason I didn't check my email was because the satellite internet available on the cruise ship was $1.50 a minute, which I would have rather spent enjoying myself. The Crisis of Focus is one we all face and one that actually has garnered a lot of attention recently.  Rather than explain ever link, I've just put together a bunch of resources that hit this problem from a number of different angles. 
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