I love getting the New York Times on Sundays and devouring it, curled up in my favorite chair sipping a cup of coffee!  It’s a luxury to me to be able to “really” read the paper and absorb the stories rather than just race through and grab information from the newspaper while getting ready to go to work.   Sundays, I use the time to discover “new” ideas, different opinions, cultural trends and business practices.  This Sunday, while reading one of my favorite features, “Corner Office” I discovered an important message.

NYTimes reporter, Adam Bryant interviewed Cristobal Conde, the president of SunGard (a software technology company) Mr. Conde is an IT kind of guy and his company is built on how to make technology available to financial, higher education, and government agencies.  Now you would think Mr. Conde is a techie freak but he isn’t.  In fact, the lessons he learned as CEO of his company it all about relationships and thinking.  Mr. Conde says he tries to take 1 1/2 hours everyday just to close his office door and think.  My first thought when reading that was, “Wow, an hour and a half? Where does he find the time?”  Think about it, or do you have the time?

Mr. Conde “makes” the time.  He believes it is so important for his company’s future that he takes time to consider, contemplate, goof off in his mind.  It doesn’t matter what he thinks about but it is important to take the time.  Mr. Conde says, “Sometimes it gets cut short.  But many topics or issues can only be dealt with in an uninterrupted format.  I worry about our entry-level people- they’re bombarded with information, and they never get to think”.

Well friends, guess what, there is a study out about that!   Yes, Stanford researchers have found that people who are multitaskers, and by that I mean even folks who are instant messaging, writing a report, and listening to music or taking phone calls do not pay attention, control their memory, and are easily distracted from any focus on the array of tasks before them.  The study was published in the Aug 24 edition  of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Their findings show that multitasking actually impairs the organizing mechanisms in your brain.

100 Students in the study were put though a series of three tests,  half were self confessed heavy multitaskers and the others were low multitaskers.  After the tests the researcher found that the high taskers were constantly distracted by irrelevant information because they just couldn’t ignore it.  Follow up studies showed that high multitaskers had a low performance in  memory  and organizing information.  They just couldn’t filter out the irrelevant information. Plus, they didn’t take in enough information to contemplate with any depth of knowledge.

So there you have it, take it from a high tech guy like Cristobal Conde, if you really want to get ahead, take time to think, one thought at a time.  Still, how the heck does he find an hour and a half?  Maybe he’s lifting weights, or would that be multitasking?  How many tasks makes multi.  Hmmm, I’ll have to think about that.

The news from Haiti has been so bleak and painful since the earthquake hit that it’s been hard to absorb it all. An estimated 200,000 people dead; hundreds of thousands more homeless, badly injured, or without any means to feed themselves and their family. Watching those images of suffering, of people with broken bones who may die because there is no medical aid to help them, has been harrowing. That’s why I have decided to take a break and turn off the TV news.

This does not mean I’m turning my back on the people of Haiti. I still intend to do whatever I can to help with recovery and rebuilding. I still intend to keep up with what is happening there by reading the newspaper or listening to the radio. What it does mean is that dragging myself down into a pit of despair watching these horrific images does nothing to help me, or more importantly, them.

Dr. Andrew Weil - the physician, author and one of the pioneers of integrative medicine – has long championed the idea of taking a periodic media break or “news fast” because he says that “Research has shown that the emotional content of the news can affect mood and aggravate sadness and depression.” In other words, those powerful images of pain and suffering can really drag you down if you are not careful.

For a lot of Americans this has been a terribly difficult couple of years. Many have lost their jobs, their homes, their medical coverage. They are worried how they are going to survive and feel that so much of what they need is no longer in their control. Even those of us fortunate enough to still have jobs know people who are out of work or fearful of losing their jobs. So to watch scenes of utter devastation in other countries can only pile on the feelings of helplessness, and bleakness. That doesn’t help anyone.

TV news is particularly powerful at conveying those emotions. While the printed page or even a radio report can bring you a sense of the drama, the suffering, the human toll, TV news brings you the images that sear into your brain and make it hard to forget. Once you have seen those faces of suffering, of loss, it’s hard to get them out of your mind.

And old colleague of mine from my TV news days, George Griswold, says he’s also giving up watching TV news coverage of Haiti. George says “It is even worse if you lived through Katrina and the aftermath. New Orleans is still fractionally re-populated, fighting with the Feds for rebuilding money… it is a long long long slog. I feel for the people of Haiti because there is no hope beyond the generosity of other nations and people.”

George is right. We’ve seen this before. We know that this is just the beginning of the recovery effort. That the people of Haiti are in for years of rebuilding and recovery and will need us to be there for the long-run, not just this week or this month.

So do yourself a favor. Take a break. Help in whatever way you can. Donate money if you can. But don’t let it overwhelm you. That won’t do you, or the people of Haiti, any good.

Every day in America 18 people die waiting for an organ transplant. Every year more than 200,000 Americans get the regular flu and more than 36,000 die from the disease and its complications; and more than 28,000 infants die before they reach their first birthday – an infant mortality rate that leaves the U.S. tied with Slovakia and Poland and only marginally ahead of Puerto Rico and Chile.

When was the last time you read about any of those threats to our national health? When was the last time you saw a sense of urgency in the media in reporting those statistics? When was the last time you heard an interview with an outraged or concerned public health expert about those deaths and why they were unacceptable?

Yeah, me too. I can’t remember the last time.

But in just the past few weeks it has been impossible to turn on the TV or radio or pick up a newspaper without being assaulted with fear and a sense of impending doom over the swine flu.

In the San Francisco Examiner, before a single case was detected in the City, there was a headline that screamed “Swine Flu Heading Our Way”. How did they know? Did someone see it buying a bus ticket in San Diego to San Francisco? Was it spotted hitch hiking along highway 280 heading towards the Bay Area?

And of course the banner headline was accompanied by the ubiquitous picture of people wearing face masks – a photo that could have been taken anywhere in the world and probably was because it certainly didn’t look like it was taken in San Francisco.

Inside the paper the actual article was much more moderate and nuanced, quoting public health officials as saying it was almost inevitable that the virus would be detected here at some point and that health officials were prepared. However,  by the time you got to that your sense of impending doom was already so high you probably missed their attempts to add an element of balance to the coverage.

Sadly that’s been all too typical of the media treatment of the swine flu. Heavy on the drama, light on the perspective. And when there was nothing new on the swine flu to report, no new cases locally, they simply switched to international coverage to focus on the fact that now three people in Germany had it, and that one person in Switzerland, Austria and Holland were also infected.

One person! Since when was it news that one person in a country half the world away had a disease! What next, “Good evening, breaking news out of Turkey where Bulent Acipgal has come down with a nasty head cold – we go live now to our reporter in Ankara with the latest. How bad is the cold Dave?”

When the media delivers a message of fear and fails to give a sense of perspective it’s not surprising that the public adopt a similar sense of, what a friend of mine called, panicdemic.

For example at one hospital near San Francisco, staff were issuing masks to friends/family visiting patients. One woman came in and asked if she could have some to take home to her family, when she was told they were for hospital visitors only the woman grabbed the entire box and ran out.

How desperate, not to say deluded, do you have to be to do something like that; to steal what you think is a vital life-saving device, not caring that you were denying protection to others just to ensure your family was safe from the swine flu.

The only bright note is that the masks really aren’t that effective against the virus anyway!

And while reporters roam the streets looking for more people to ask how scared they feel about the swine flu, the real stories get ignored. And so more people die waiting for a transplant because there are not enough organ donors, and more infants die because we don’t offer every woman in the country pre-natal care, which would help protect the health of the mother and baby.