How long is your attention....................span?

How long is your attention span? Is it something that you can measure? I once worked for a guy who had an attention span that lasted half of a conversation. It didn't matter how long your conversation actually was; he was finished halfway through.

It was not a matter of duration; however, it was a matter of intelligence. More specifically, this man thought that he was a lot smarter than he really was. I found speaking with him extraordinarily difficult, because he had a bad habit of tuning out halfway into the conversation, then interrupting you to sum up what you were trying to say. He did this because he was absolutely confident that he had managed to figure out the point that you were trying to make, based on only half of the information. It was quite frustrating, and his conclusions about what I was trying to say were usually completely wrong.

It is easy to criticize my former colleague's bad habits retrospectively; yet, as I have become more accustomed to tweeting my thoughts, or inferring news from sensationalized headlines, it made me wonder: am I also guilty of this habit?

Have I unintentionally made my attention span shorter?

The idea of withering attention spans gives me pause, because it goes straight to the heart of communication. How can you communicate clearly and express yourself effectively, if your audience cannot pay attention to you? While brevity and succinctness can be beautiful things, I worry about the potential for miscommunication when someone's full message is not absorbed. In fact, a story from my road-warrior days comes to mind, which helps make this point crystal clear.

When I was still working for a defense contractor, I spent a lot of time traveling to different U.S. Air Force bases. Most of the trips were tedious and boring, but occasionally, I would get the chance to visit a place where I had friends nearby. I really looked forward to these trips, because (as many road warriors will tell you) the worst part about business travel isn't the cramped airline seats, or the security lines at the airport, or even the hotel room comforters covered with other guests' mystery stains. The worst part of business travel is the solitude.

Naturally, I was thrilled when I found out that one of my trips would take me to Colorado Springs. Since I spent ten years living in the Denver metropolitan area, I knew that I would be able to see my old college friends during my free time. My solitude problem was solved! I arrived in Colorado Springs, and quickly made plans to see some friends who lived up near Greeley later in the week.

I guess the farmer couldn't afford
space on a commercial billboard...

A couple of days later, I was leaving Colorado Springs and driving north on I-25. After I had passed through downtown Denver, the subdivisions that lie north of the city slowly gave way to industrial areas, and the stores and houses were replaced by warehouses and parking lots. I kept driving north, and the warehouses were eventually replaced by fields and barns. I was pretty far outside of Denver by this time, and the landscape looked less like the Rocky Mountains, and more like the plains of Kansas. On one side of the highway, nestled in between the fields of green corn stalks, was a homemade billboard. The billboard caught my eye as I was driving north at 70 MPH, because the owner had the foresight to paint the sign yellow with big black letters.

The sign was an obvious declaration of the farmer’s views on reproductive rights, and even though I was zooming by at highway speeds, I could clearly make out the words:

ABORTION STOPS A BEATING ♥

Apparently, the farmer had run out of space to write the word "heart" at the bottom of the sign, so he substituted a red heart shape in the lower right corner of the sign. It seemed like a pretty simple solution, since it managed to get the same point across.

Theoretically, this is...

Even though the farmer had the foresight to paint his sign yellow and use large block letters for his message, he didn’t have the foresight to trim the weeds around the base of the sign. One unfortunate weed was particularly vigorous, and had grown tall enough to obscure the bottom right-hand corner of the billboard, including the carefully painted heart symbol. The resulting message that greeted folks driving north on I-25 was a bit harsher in tone. The partially obscured sign read: ABORTION STOPS A BEATING

I found it rather incredible that the omission of one small word (or symbol, even!) could drastically change the meaning of this statement. Needless to say, I laughed all the way to my friend’s house and told him all about this act of botanical censorship. Yet, the story illustrates how dangerous it can be to draw conclusions. Too often I find myself trying to draw conclusions from something I am reading or hearing. I'm not sure why people like me act this way, but since I have been on both sides of this kind of situation, I've come to the conclusion that it all boils down to patience.

We all live in an age when time is viewed as currency, and our culture has become obsessed with the idea of "wasting time." As our culture becomes more and more accustomed to getting our information on-demand from the Internet, we slowly reinforce the idea that we should not have to wait for information. If you take this notion one step further, you can argue that waiting for information (i.e., being patient while someone expresses themselves, whether verbally or in writing) is a waste of time. As this folkway becomes more ingrained, the result is an overabundance of brevity (e.g., tweets, text messages, and bullet points that replace prose and literature), and a shortage of patience.

Over the years, I've tried to be more patient and wait for people to communicate their entire message (maybe it's because I like surprises), but there are others out there who still struggle with it. I am reminded of it every time I'm confronted at work with sentence-finishers (those lucky people who are so damn smart that they feel obligated to finish your sentences), and they always remind me of my former colleague who just had to make your point for you!

I’m not sure if my former colleague would have inferred the same meaning from that homemade billboard, but the moral shouldn’t be hard to see. Firstly, make sure you leave enough room for all the words on your homemade billboards! And secondly, if someone is communicating with you, it is worthwhile to pay attention to the entire message. It could save a life, or at least prevent a whoopin’.

Thanks for reading this ENTIRE post!
-Lee