Work, family, friends, personal interests, and hobbies are just a few things that compete for our attention. Now add technology. How do the other concerns stack up and does the competition distract or muddy priorities? What is more important?

 Let’s start by looking from the perspective of time, attention, and Technology benefits.

Time and attention requirements of activities

A lot of man's activity is directed toward the realization of some good, and activity needs time to think and to act. We are all mindful of the various demands on our time. As we will see below, a lot of those demands come about due to technological objects. But, just as essential, activity needs attention. Attention is aware, effortful thought focused on a pretty small subset of all the stimuli, information, and knowledge (both external and internal) available to us at any given time.

Limits to attention

Now it is definitely true that some activities need very little attention. Routine, well-practiced, "overlearned" activities used to environments, like walking around in one’s house and driving a familiar stretch of road, need attention only to start and terminate -- so long as no sudden events occur. The number of routinized activities one can involve in at any given time seems to be narrow mostly by sensory capacities and the number of attachments one has.

But a person can actually only involve in one activity requiring sensible, effortful thought at a time. This is especially true of activities focused toward the highest good.

But modern technology complicates that attention allocation process in a number of ways. First, it creates a lot of opportunities to realize the good and avoid the bad, and so enables and facilitates numerous activities so directed.

Technology creates opportunities to get to things that matter done.

There are a lot of ways in which modern technology creates opportunities to realize human good. Just as it makes it possible for me to partake to whatever degree I want in environmental organizations, so it facilitates my contribution in relief and other philanthropic organizations, both religious and secular.

Medical technology provides quite a few opportunities for people to get good health. Whenever any of us become ill, for instance, we avail ourselves of the technology provided by some of the doctors. Also if the victim is one of our kids, the journey to town to the doctor’s office is always arranged by means of communication technology and facilitated by transportation technology.

In respect to its good of providing for the material needs and wants of anybody. Technology is an amazing great enabler. Away from the agricultural and manufacturing technologies that make these many human needed products available, information and communication technology also always brings to the knowledge of people about their availability. Thus give rise to the want -- if not the need -- to get them. Our car makes it possible to travel to the town or to a more distant city. Adding to the above mentioned point, we have been doing quite a number of catalogs shopping recently, a phenomenon almost completely dependent on modern technology. The mail brings us to the catalogs and even though we can place our orders by mail as well, we commonly decide to make use of the telephone for this purpose. That is possible, in part, as a result of credit card technology we use to pay for the products, which are delivered in just a few days by the airplanes and other modern technology of package delivery services.

Technological busyness

So we see that technology give rise to a lot of opportunities to get many things done, that technological objects themselves need time and attention for their acquisition, use, and discarding. The typical person is therefore confronted with an irresistible multitude of technology-induced activities which I refer to as technology busyness.

One effect of technological busyness is mental distress. There is a tendency among people to hopefully take on new activities than they should. They become upset and upset when they understand that there is not enough time to do everything that they would like to do.