THAT'S MEN:In these hectic times, uninterrupted attention is a rare and valuable commodity
THE TRADITIONAL image of the craftsman is similar to that of the artist in one respect. We picture both as deeply involved with their work, giving it their full attention until it is done. Today, the craftsman is likely to be interrupted by the mobile phone, or may have to break off work to send an e-mail - and may take a quick look at what's happening on Facebook at the same time.
But it's not just craftsmen who find it a struggle to give their full attention to their work.
People working in almost any environment are now likely to be interrupted and rarely experience the satisfaction of giving their full attention to a task until it is done.
The same, it should be acknowledged, is true of full-time parents. To them, the notion of being able to start something and finish it without interruption is like something belonging to a golden era which will not return for years. In my view, that's why parents so often end up with that harassed, haunted look on their faces. They are permanently discombobulated and they don't like it; it makes them cranky.
Not only in parenting but also in the workplace, we lived in an era of interruption before mobile phones or the internet came along.
This probably started when it became feasible for workplaces to put a telephone on every desk. Up to that point, interruptions came, I assume (yes, it was before my time) in the form of letters which could be answered when you got around to it.
The wheel began to spin faster when the fax machine arrived. Documents no longer arrived and went out in the post. They arrived instantly, and an instant response was expected.
And now things are so bad that there's even a field of work called interruption science. If you've never heard of it before, I have to tell you that it's been around for nearly 20 years. An early exponent, Mary Czerwinski, was hired by Nasa to tell them how to interrupt astronauts effectively when they were absorbed in their work up in space.
Czerwinski later went to work for Microsoft. You know those helpful little thingies that pop up on your screen now and then and that you respond to even though you've promised yourself you'll stop doing it? Blame Mary.
According to a new book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, many of us switch tasks every three minutes on average. Once we've switched, we take nearly half an hour to get back to what we were doing.
And these interruptions, the book's author Maggie Jackson points out, leave people tired, cranky and dissatisfied.
Interruptions are also bad for the quality of the work. This is why some corporations have introduced days when interruptions from e-mail and other technologies are meant to be kept to a minimum.
I expect that our increasingly frazzled lifestyle also accounts for the growing interest in mindfulness.
Maintaining a moment-to-moment awareness of your experience - the essence of mindfulness - gives you that split-second mental space which allows you to make a choice as to whether to follow every interruption that pops up.
Essentially, though, I think we need to change our attitudes to the concept of paying attention to what we're doing.
When I was a kid, I didn't really like paying attention to things that were humdrum and boring. That's the way it is with kids - so the whole notion of paying attention gets a really, really bad press in the junior years.
In our own different ways, we have all ended up with our own version of attention deficit disorder, and we are encouraged in this by the way work and the world are organised.
So if you can begin to change your attitude and to value uninterrupted attention, you might begin to see ways to get more of that at work and at home.
And if you're in a traditional arrangement where you're the full-time earner and your partner is a full-time mother, you might be more inclined to see to it, when you're around, that she gets periods of uninterrupted peace.
Which will make her less cranky - which is good.
• Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor. That's Men, the best of the That's Men columns from The Irish Timesis published by Veritas.