As more and more information is being proliferated and consumed over the Web, it seems that our attention spans have taken a hit. I recently came across some interesting musings by Newfangled’s Chris Butler on the subject:

In a recent WIRED article summarizing some points from his book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argues that hyperlinks may actually disrupt concentration and weaken comprehension—effectively hindering our ability to engage in “deep reading.” When I read this last week, it immediately struck me as true—I know that the more links I encounter in an article, the more likely I am to feel overwhelmed with options that I am inclined to follow up upon.

While I won’t paraphrase my entire comment on this blog (if you scroll down, mine is the first comment), one of the things that I can say from my own experience (and those of several posts I’ve read recently about time management and maintaining productivity) is that yes, links are distracting. Very distracting.

To people like us, who love to absorb information and learn new things, a couple of reference links within a short blog post can easily turn into a half hour of reading a bunch of different stuff on a topic that has no relation to what you’re immediately doing. In my own life, I’ve noticed that this tendency causes me to work late into some evenings just to finish up the work that I had to get done that day.

Here’s the thing: information is valuable. It is. It’s important to learn new things and stay on top of what you’re doing. But the time we spend clicking on all of these links and reading this interesting stuff? It’s not billable. And as the creators of this content, it’s important for us to respect this fact and enable our readers to absorb the information we have for them, not send them off in a million different directions because someone on Twitter thought that our post was cool.

I don’t know that there’s an immediate solution to this. Chris mentions a couple of good suggestions, and I have a few thoughts that I’ll be implementing in the zen kitchen‘s website sometime soonish, but at the very least, it’s something to think about.