When I started playing Bridge in the National arena, I used to practice the game online with my partner, my batchmate from IIT Delhi, on websites such as bridgebse or Okbridge. The latter is a serious website where you can pit yourself against top players around the globe. Although my partner was a serious bridge enthusiast, he had an annoying habit of chatting online while playing. The moment it was not his turn to play a card, he would press ‘alt + tab’ and switch to chatting on his messenger or a chatroom. Consequently, he would continuously commit small errors that would cost us our game. And as a result of his chatting, he could never pay attention on the game for a long time in order to reach the depths of the game. He was hooked to chatting. And when I realized that, I gave up on the partnership.
While heading a content-development team in one of the leading test prep company, I was in charge of hiring content developers and train them. On my boss’ recommendation, I took a bright, energetic and a dandy chap in my team. He was intelligent and could have been turned into a great content developer. The chap used to visit Orkut nearly every minute. To our horror, he introduced Orkut to everyone in the team, and within a month we started having serious issues in productivity and quality of our team. In the end, we banned Orkut in our company.
And now Twitter is here. But story does not end here.
As technology is making communication easier and easier it is creating more and more noise in people’s lives. Ringing cellphones, SMS from friends or opposite sex, Orkut, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo messengers or Gtalk, Chatrooms, Porn sites, and so many other distractions that spread their webs inside our lives and take away so many precious hours from us. Not only that, they prevent us from concentrating on our work and ultimately leave us a mediocre person.
If you want to be good at anything in life you would have to focus your life and soul into it. And that means, living, eating, and walking your passion and blind yourself to anything else. The above mentioned distractions not only take our time, they consume a large amount of passion you could have used somewhere else. If you have ever woken up in the night with a feeling to check your twitter or your inbox or your messenger, you probably know what I am talking about.
There is one more seductive and corrupting influence on the net- that of forums. I visit a lot of MBA forums and I see students filling pages after pages talking about MBA exams. The phenomenon operating behind this idle chit chat is still the same- that of connecting with people. Picture this- a CAT aspirant comes to his office at 10:00 am, opens a website, reads the threads and comments that have come last night, and then posts some of his own. It’s fun discussing about MBA with other aspirants. He keeps on logging in throughout the day to check replies on his comment. The more replies come, the more he is engrossed in further comments. And all the while his supervisor is screaming at him to work. And before he knows, the day passes away. The student is satisfied that he has indulged in ’some kind of preparation.’ The hard fact is, he has done nothing.
The tacit agreement between Dagny and me is that if a thread does not contain discussion of problems, it is to be deleted. It is good to have fun talks with other aspirant and it does happen while two or three students are discussing problems but to promote a thread containing complete blather is feed the monster inside the students.
So if you are a student studying online for CAT, and there is a chat window, or an orkut/ facebook window, or a porn site open on your computer while you are studying, let me give it to you buddy- you are hardly studying at all. You would be one of the students asking for solutions, because you would not be the one solving them. You would be busy tweeting.
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That’s true sir,Students waste a lot of time in forums nowdays .
I am not at extreme but I do agree that I keep on checking the replies on my forums and blogs. I had deleted my Orkut account a year back when I started my preparation but joined facebook around two months back
I really need to give serious thoughts about my extra browsing activities…. At this time, when we stat feeling low because of low scores in mocks and get disheartened, these extra activities increases….
Thank you for your strict words…..
Hi Vivek,
On the internet, everything is available within a matter of clicks. And it is both good and bad. Good because as a source of information, internet is amazing. And as I said in one of my articles, students in far flung cities can access TG and learn. That is the beauty of the net. But on the dark side, it catches a lot of people- youngsters especially- in its seductiveness and wastes their time. Students engrossed in chatting, forums etc. can always do a little more than they are doing, perform a little better than they are if they ustilise this time. I rarely ever visit my Orkut account. We made a TG community on Orkut once but then decided it would harm students and let it stagnate. I am not on facebook. My cellphone stays on silent. Twitter, I never visited although Dagny uses it for business purposes. In short, I prefer to be cutoff from all modes of communication in order to work peacefully. And if I am free, I prefer reading a novel instead.
well said sir….true….unknowingly we waste a lot of time surfing and chatting & posting…never really thought about it this way and used to wonder how to find the required time for studies…thanks for waking us up…
Sir, The Information was valuable. As Robin Sharma said in his ” The monk who sold his Ferrari” that, to accomplish a task lot of energy is required…these distractions just sap that energy”.
true enough,we people are turning into schizophrenics,(infact i was one of the blabbering crowd untill i realized it)and the nature of attention these forums provide is pretty seductive! what i have come across is that people now enjoy knowing the solutions of problems,rather than the art of problem solving itself! one thing i admire about you tg sir is that you call a spade a spade! keep writing such good stuff!
Very honestly written.This artcle presents the true picture of today.I have seen many people in my office falling prey to all these distractions.