8 Seconds

You have the attention span of a gold fish! How many times have you been told that - be honest now…

While studies have been conducted to refute the fact that goldfish have an attention span of 9 seconds - they still get a bad name. I haven't blogged in over 2 years now and honestly I could validate that by giving a gazillion excuses ranging from I switched jobs to my neighbors cat died. The truth of the fact is that I’m lazy. 

So what prompted this post? A tall lanky just-stopped-being-a-teenager-boy. A UI Designer who came in for an interview. Now as a good recruiter (yea stop raising those eyebrows I AM GOOD) I am supposed to do a thorough check on every candidate. So when one thinks UI Designer - studying automobile engineering (geek!) - still trying to clear his backlogs (WTF?!?!) - famous for inventing an alarm clock that shocks you out of bed…aha you've stopped paying attention haven't you?

Ok I am not trying to blog about this kid, he already has a blog of his own (http://experiments.themadscientistlab.com/) - I got moved by a comment he made about my last (enormously long) blog post - he tried to read it and lost focus less than half way through. To cover up my embarrassment I promptly told him to read my other posts (I DO WRITE SHORT POSTS!)

As pissed as I was by his honesty - I decided to comeback by writing this post - as human beings are evolving our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. A lot of us suffer from some form of ADD and don't even realize it because its normal to get bored…we are Gen Y after all…or are we Gen Z? Argh whatever. So what does one do to keep someone interested? Keep it simple - keep it short.

I can’t count the number of times my brain has just switched off while interviewing a candidate - because IHTBSB (short for "I’ve Heard This Bullshit Before)...or the number of times I switch stations on the radio while traveling to work...SMS lingo has killed the English language by all but eliminating the vowels. Food has become fast, data no longer sits on your computer’s hard disk - it floats on a cloud, books are no longer read, pages no longer turned - you've not heard of a Kindle and Audio Books? Were you living under a rock all these years?!?! 

Decreasing attention spans are increasing innovation - there are people out there constantly trying to churn out cool new stuff to ensure you get bored quicker and they have an opportunity to launch a next version which promises to be x times better/faster/more convenient than its predecessor - to continue to engage you as their "valued customer" (read commercial guinea pig). 

Ok I’m going to abruptly end this post now…because I’ve lost track of why I was writing it in the first place :-/ eeeks

P.S. It just takes a tiny nudge to break a writers block - I got two such nudges - a big thank you to Laddu (for not having the attention span of a goldfish and enduring ALL my posts) and to Sankalp Sinha for telling me my blog post is too long (I hope this one manages to retain your attention)