Distraction Paradigm

My colleague and I collect cartoons related to student life.  There's something that could be called the Distraction Paradigm, which is what happens when a student is distracted from the original task to something more pleasurable and loses control of the time spent.  That's usually when we professors hear things like "This took me like, forever, to finish!"  or "Do you want to know how much time I spent on this paper of yours?"  (It's always MY paper, even though they wrote it.)

While sometimes I'll arch an eyebrow and say something like "Sounds like a time management problem to me," after reading the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, I now approach this more directly, asking them how many devices they had next to them or consulted while they were writing.  The above cartoon is an excellent example of the problem faced by students.

Or by any of us.  While writing this short blurb, I deviated away from the writing several times in order to check the exact wording of the title, the spelling of another word, the meaning of yet another.  And since being laid up with my foot, I now welcome distractions as I'm not trying to get anything accomplished, other than laying here with my foot up doing nothing, wondering if I should call interrupt Dave and what he's doing in order to come up here and vacuum the cobwebs off the ceiling in the bedroom.