I am a procrastinator.
I blame it on my personality-type. I’m not really into personality tests, but I do know my Myers-Briggs letters (INFP, if you’re interested). Whilst P stands for ‘Perceiving’, I always think of it as standing for ‘Procrastinator’, because P-people are good at doing stuff at the last-minute – and that sure is me.
However, alongside Myers-Briggs and my general last-minute-ness, I recognise that a lot of my procrastinating, faffing tendencies are made so much worse by my use of screens. You may recognise that in yourself too.
Researchers have found that the internet, and social media use in particular, have a negative effect on our focus and concentration. The plethora of notifications and the encouragement to multi-task affects our ability to concentrate on just one task for longer periods. One study looked at ‘classroom digital metacognition’ in university students – whether students demonstrated good decision making in class – and found it was made much worse by social media presence. It’s not surprising. If you’re active on five or six platforms, you’re having to manage five or six platforms’ worth of notifications. It’s both harder to concentrate and harder to resist putting your phone away and out of sight.
Distraction plays out in other areas too. When you’re hanging out with friends, how often do you tune out and start looking at your phone because another notification has popped up, and you feel anxious about what you’re missing out on? Our phones and social media have entered our lives and begun to take over. They steal our attention, focus and affections away from what is truly important. We demonstrate that our real love is the phone and what it represents, rather than the person standing in front of us.
It’s a pretty terrible way to behave isn’t it? And yet there’s worse to come.
When it comes to spending time praying or reading the Bible or otherwise spending time alone with God, how often do you get distracted by your phone buzzing beside you? Perhaps you don’t even manage that time with God because you’re too busy checking your messages, or scrolling through Twitter. When we stop to really think about it, we’re horrified. Of course we know that God is more important than a phone, it’s just that we don’t always behave that way.
So, what can we do to change?
Firstly, accept that if you want to change, it’s not about summoning up the right amount of will-power, but rather call on God for his help, and resting in Jesus who lived a life fully devoted to God on our behalf. As a Christian you are hidden in Christ, and you’re called to fix your eyes on him, and your heart on things in heaven where he is.
Secondly, listen to these words from Paul in 2 Corinthians 10:5: ‘We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.’ There is something active and ongoing in this process, and it might be as simple as this: when you sit down to pray or read your Bible and find yourself drifting off in your thoughts, stop, recognise that thought, and ask for God’s help to ignore it, and instead focus on him.
Thirdly, make some decisions that will help you to be less distracted whether you're praying or spending time with friends or sitting through a lecture: turn off your notifications, or put your phone on ‘do not disturb’ or just make a habit of putting it away in your bag, where you won’t see it, and you won’t feel it buzz. These things aren’t going to change or fix our hearts, but they will reduce the number of distractions that our minds have to contend with, and they will demonstrate to our friends that they are important to us, and give them a little glimpse of what it’s like to be known and loved by the One who is never distracted or tempted away.
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