Learning by Heart: Maintaining Attention

I am not sure just how effective this attention technique would turn out for other people but I am able to successfully employ it and, perhaps, other people might be able to benefit from it if they somehow think the same way I do.

I often have trouble concentrating on long readings and my mind will tend to wander. Before I know it, I've been staring at a single page for 20 minutes daydreaming about other things or I distract myself by randomly wanting to google something that has no connection to what I was already doing.

In order to keep myself more engaged with my work I need to switch tasks consistently in order to break gridlock. Often, I do this by switching between multiple readings. I find that not only does this keep me reading for longer, but it also helps me to synthesize the things that I'm reading into something more coherent to talk about in class. Usually, I employ this technique by reading several pages of a article or book until I feel myself getting bored. This can happen anywhere between 3 and 10 pages, or even never if I really like what I'm reading! When I do get bored though, I make a note of where I left off and then switch to another reading. When I get board of that, I can either switch to yet another reading (as I typically have a great many due at one), or I can switch back to the original reading.

I understand that this technique may not work for everyone, but I doubt that I am the only person who thinks this way and gets distracted so easily. I need to be engaged with things moving more rapidly and I think it's possible that other people have a similar problem and could benefit from the same system.

(a somewhat unnerving picture of someone multi-tasking)