Art Productivity with a Post-Pandemic Shortened Attention Span
Sunday, 18. December 2022 22:39
We are just now beginning to understand the impact of the pandemic on our psychology and physiology. And things are not looking wonderful. For example, Many experts argue that the pandemic has “accelerated a shift in attention spans.” Some say it is the pandemic coupled with the increasing amount of time we spend online that have shortened attention spans. Still others say these factors have not reduced our attention spans, but rather have reduced “our ability to engage with new ideas,” so “it’s harder to get our attention in the first place.”
Regardless of the exact nature of the problem, no one denies that it exists. The problem remains that we have difficulty giving our attention to projects for sustained periods of time. While this is a problem for nearly everyone, it is particularly acute for artists. As artists we must engage new ideas at every turn, particularly when working on a new project. Many of us are used to working for long hours at a stretch, and a significant percentage of us are finding that difficult in the post-pandemic world. It makes our work attempts more frustrating. Since the condition that we are experiencing was built up over time, the possible solutions are not likely to be immediate, but we must at least begin looking for them.
While he does not acknowledge the exact nature of the problem, senior art critic for New York Magazine and Pulitzer Prize winner Jerry Saltz, offers one such solution: “Artists maybe looking for a prompt to get them working: Try approaching a day in your studio as a jam session. Not doing things that take a long time. But working out things spontaneously in response to what is being worked out. What’s deeper inside will come out this way too.”
This idea can be developed even further and our work can become a reflection of the way we are currently thinking; it can become broken into very short segments that do not require long spans of concentration: we can work on one detail in a painting or sculpture. We can read an act or a few scenes of a play at a sitting instead of the whole thing. We can write a page or few pages—or even a few paragraphs—at a time instead of the dozen pages that we used to target. We can break a photo editing session into segments so that we are fresh and creative for the short time we are committing to each segment. We can even juggle tasks so that we work on them for short times before trading off to the next one.
And those of us in collaborative arts need to remind ourselves that our collaborators are likely experiencing the same problems and frustrations that we are, so the structure of the collaborative process may need alteration to be successful.
We should, of course, be aware that there may be new frustrations in modifying our work routines; however, the reward of actually accomplishing something (and thereby maybe tricking ourselves into longer involvement than we anticipated) makes that frustration worth it.
The key is to use short pieces of time productively instead of becoming frustrated because we cannot maintain concentration for the longer periods of time that we used to use. Doing this we can again become productive rather than wallowing in frustration and accomplishing nothing.
Category:Productivity | Comment (0) | Author: Jay Burton