Thomas Sutcliffe: There's not a moment that can't be wasted

I should have started writing this ages ago, frankly, but I got waylaid by an eye-catching statistic in one of the Sundays. Apparently the distracting electronic ping announcing the arrival of a new email has been calculated to be causing a 0.5 per cent drop in gross domestic product in the United States, at a cost to the economy of some $70bn a year.

This struck me as so magnificently spurious a finding that I went websurfing for a source, eventually turning up an even more impressive bottom line for technology-induced butterfly-mindedness – the whopping $588bn which a 2006 study calculated was the price tag on the 2.1 hours of work time that went missing from the average working day because of interruptions.

And then – the internet being the internet – I thought I'd better check on the Drudge report to see if anything was happening on Obama's foreign trip, got sideswiped from that into an item about Steve Jobs' health, which lead me to check out whether O2 had any iPhones in stock yet ... and then my own inbox pinged and I realised that what I sometimes laughably describe as my train of thought had been completely decoupled and shunted into several different sidings.

Inadvertently, I'd offered an example of precisely what the original article had been on about: the lethal modern availability of forms of procrastination. It has got so bad, according to several American experts, that it's time to recognise that it's actually a clinical affliction.

This sounds suspiciously like that familiar tendency of experts to define a syndrome which they can then be profitably expert about. But even if you suspect that another claim is being staked out on the lucrative gold seam of human neurosis, it's hard to deny that something true is being described here.

I doubt that the Tel Aviv Procrastination Inventory and the Tuckman Procrastination Scale – two psychological questionnaires designed to establish the gravity of a chronic procrastinator's disease – are really measuring anything substantive. But they do register an anxiety about the downside of our interconnected world, which is that distraction is available at the press of a button and, all too often, a button that someone else is pressing.

No wonder there's an online support group for the problem, the Deprocrastination Club ("There is a chatroom," explains another procrastination expert drily, "but there hasn't been much activity." Presumably they just never quite get round to it).

There are plenty of theories about why modern life should have so aggravated a perennial human failing – including the suggestion that the demands of time-clocked, post-industrial work have stirred a rebellion in our souls. But surely opportunity and opportunity alone pretty much covers it.

Working with pen and paper, the options for distraction were pretty limited. You could doodle in the margin or look out of the window at a view that was broadly unchanging. Now, though, we can look out of windows, tessellated across our computer screens and offering a virtually limitless spectacle of worlds existent and imaginary.

The result is that anyone who fears finding themselves alone with their own uncertainty – or momentary doubt – can dodge into the electronic undergrowth and hide from those fruitful confrontations. It's unquestionably bad for us, I think, and I'm going to take steps to wean myself off my own addiction. I'll do it soon ... honest ... right after I've checked my Scrabulous games.

Did Gehry lose the manual?

A brilliant example of resourceful curating is the Serpentine Gallery's annual architectural commission for a summer pavilion. Achieved without any extra government funding and with startlingly short lead times, it plants a substantial architectural calling card in Hyde Park once a year.

Frank Gehry's new pavilion looks like a freeze-frame of a collapsing conservatory, in the process of self-disassembly because it was erected by someone who'd lost the instructions and half of the bolts, but decided to press ahead anyway. I'm still not sure whether I admire its assault on architectural convention or find it showily self-regarding, but it's great to be able to walk around it as you try to decide.

* Warner Brothers will be making sure that you get to hear about The Dark Knight's "record-breaking opening" after the latest Batman film cleared $155.3m over the weekend. They won't be pointing out that breaking box-office records is all but inevitable given rising ticket prices and population growth. Studios also go to great lengths to ensure their films hit the ground running.

The Dark Knight, for example, opened in a staggering 4,366 cinemas and also laid on special midnight screenings to bump the figures up – hoping to generate a sheep-like stampede for tickets in the first week, when studios take a much bigger percentage of audience dollar than in succeeding weeks. It did very well, unquestionably, and, yes, Heath Ledger is arrestingly creepy. But take all that hype about record-breaking with a pinch of salt. It's just another Batman movie.

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk