March Madness Boss Button: Adults Get Distracted Online and Multitask, too!

I'm not a basketball fan, so March Madness has never been something I give much attention.  I prefer hockey and am excited about the Minnesota Wild's upcoming Wildcard spot!  My two sons like basketball, so there were a lot of games on TV this weekend in our house and conversations about brackets, including the question about the odds of a perfect bracket (1 in 9.2 quintillion).

Since I'm not a big basketball fan, I wasn't aware of the "Boss Button" until a friend showed it to me on his computer.  Basically, you can stream all the NCAA Mach Madness games online as shown below.  

If you are doing this when you shouldn't be, i.e. at work, and your boss happens to walk by, never fear, you can simply click the blue "Boss Button" and then the second screen pictured below appears. This second screen makes it look like you are working on a Google Slideshow of your accomplishments instead of watching basketball on the job.

 

What struck me most when I saw this was the simple fact that the existence of this Boss Button shows that even adults have distractions. It is a life skill for everyone today to learn how to deal with them, not just students in school. The line between using technology tools for both tasks and leisure is blurred more and more each day as the tools become more accessible from anywhere and through any device.  We can do work at home and access entertainment while at work.

In school, we continue to have many discussions among staff and with students about the need to teach students to use technology responsibly. We want to do this teaching when they are in school so they are not graduating with bad habits, but instead know how to handle distractions when they are on their own.  We want them to learn these important self-discipline skills while under the supervision of parents and teachers, not when their job is on the line as an adult.

FYI, it turns out the Boss Button apparently has been around since 2006.  More on that here.  It turns out there is even a "Student" option with academic fake screens, in addition to the fake work screen shots, which is ironic as this article points out.