I once came across some of my old grade school report cards.  In those days the teacher wrote a detailed assessment, in longhand, of each child’s good traits along with those that needed improvement.  My mother would send them back with her own mini-essay and a promise to work on the issues.

Penmanship was always a recurring theme on these early performance reviews. My teachers could not have known that cursive writing would soon be disappearing altogether, and I would spend most of my professional life in front of a keyboard.  Another issue was short attention span, which my mother dutifully signed up to fix.  To this day, I’m not sure what she actually did to improve this, but I do know that it didn’t work.

It would be easy to say that these days I am not alone with this problem, and to point the finger at the smartphones we all carry.  It’s not that simple. <continue>