I go in with the best of intentions, but it sure doesn’t take much to get distracted.
Many times over the course of a regular workday, I’ll have the need to check something on the internet, so I’ll open a new tab, which brings me to a landing page with a sea of headlines that are all vying for my attention.
Unfortunately for my workflow, these headlines often win, which is undoubtedly their goal and I imagine that I’m not the only one that gets caught in their net. In my defence, as a lifelong newspaper guy, I’m always consuming news, so I can’t just turn it off when there’s a firehose of content in front of me.
Take last week for instance. While in search of background for a story on the Terry Fox Run, I was instead lured by an article on the implications of NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh pulling out of the 2022 agreement to prop up Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. I learned that although the move makes a federal election more likely, it’s far from a certainty.
While on the hunt for stats from the Calgary Real Estate Board, I was derailed by a story about Canadian golf icon Mike Weir and the six picks he made to round out his Presidents Cup roster, while in my quest to find the correct spelling of the Star Blanket First Nation for a story on Detour Country’s upcoming show in Diamond Valley, I inadvertently found my way to an article on Calgary’s Green Line, learning that disillusioned city officials are considering turning over the LRT project to the provincial government.
I like to think that some of the information I glean on these side trips can be beneficial, at least as background, so it’s not really stealing time from the company, although it might be difficult to convince the publisher that knowing the names of the six golfers added to the international team for this month’s Presidents Cup will prove useful moving forward.
He will be happy to know, however, that I’ve stopped short of falling prey to the most overt of all clickbait. I didn’t take the 1970s slang quiz, although I think I might have done OK, nor did I explore photos of famed sitcom casts. There was even an opportunity to click on ‘20 actors who picked up a new skill for a movie role,’ but I resisted.
The worst part in all of this is that after spending a minute or so reading a story that’s caught my eye, I often can’t remember why I launched a new page in the first place. I sit there trying to recall what prompted me to go on the web, but my short-term memory tends to conspire against me.
When nothing comes to me, I’ll often scan to see what else I’ve got open on my computer in the hopes it will jog my memory, which will often do the trick, although sometimes I just have to wait for inspiration to strike.
In the meantime, at least I’m caught up on the news of the day.
