From a ‘90s generation perspective, I’ve found the change in lifestyle with advent of the Internet to be fascinating.

I remember those elementary school weekends, when I was helplessly sitting at home instead of playing outside due to rain. These memories hold a special place in my heart, because those were the only times when I was absolutely bored out of my mind.

Back then, there was practically no Internet. Dial-up was incredibly unreliable and slow. With the numerous phone calls made on the house line, the most popular song of the day would often be the AOL loading screen white noise.

Even when I was able to get online, there wasn’t that much content running. I could have read new books, but I only could get so much out of those until my next trip to the library. How about playing with friends indoors? Nothing like another game of Monopoly to cheer us up.

Life was slower back then, and when the Internet finally blew up, it was evident.

Suddenly, social media was sprouting everywhere. Facebook, YouTube, movies, games. Everything is now only a few clicks away. Information is much more accessible.

Now we have platforms like Tumblr, Twitter and Reddit, where you could spend your entire lifetime going down the rabbit-hole without ever reaching the end. With the power of the Internet, we’ve solved boredom, which has plagued people for countless generations. However, this new paradigm in technology has led to a new kind of problem.

There is simply too much to do online. As a society, we’ve entered the point where the Internet might even have too much content to keep us occupied. If you aren’t careful, that one click on an online post can rob you of the rest of your day.

It’s also so easy to become distracted by the cascades of notifications on our computers and phones. Multi-tasking has become more necessary than ever.

Except multi-tasking isn’t even a real thing. A study conducted by Stanford University compared the performance between heavy and light multitaskers, and how they handled assignments. They found heavy multitaskers had a very difficult time ignoring any irrelevant information presented, and were bad at switching between tasks.

The overall conclusion was the heavy multitaskers were unable to filter what wasn’t relevant to their current goal, so their performance suffered as a result.

After reading the study, I realized that I was a lot like these “heavy multitaskers” when near a computer. I’ve become so used to flipping through information like I can online, that focusing on one task has become hard.

Back then, the boredom I had from those rainy days motivated me to do something productive with my time. Once the Internet became relevant, it became an easy way for me to divert my spare time, and sometimes my not-so-spare time.

After spending less time on the computer and more time reading books again, I’ve become more accustomed to concentrating on a single subject. Without any hyperlinks to lead me off into a tangent, I feel a lot more settled in the task at hand and less tempted to get distracted.

When it comes to the Internet, I think it’s an incredible tool and is something we shouldn’t take for granted.

But it might not be bad to take some time away from it and get what we need to get done.