In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed
We live in a world scarce of understanding and abundant with information. We complain that we never have any free time yet we seek distraction. If work can’t distract us, we distract ourselves. …
Multitasking
How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught
No skill is more valuable and harder to come by than the ability to critically think through problems. When it comes to thinking, the mind has an optimal way to be operated. When operated correctly, …
Improve Your Life by Paying Attention
“Few things are as important to your quality of life as your choices about how to spend the precious resource of your free time,” writes Winifred Gallagher, author of the book Rapt: …
Technology and Intermittent Reinforcement
Recent digital technologies generate a perfect storm of anti-attention, largely because they draw on the tremendous power of what B. F. Skinner called ‘intermittent reinforcement.’ We click the ‘new …
The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time
Tony Schwartz, author of Be Excellent at Anything, remarks that the biggest cost to splitting our attention among various activities is to productivity. He offers some advice on getting back on track: …
The Power of Concentration
Maria Konnikova, writes in the New York Times on what we can learn from Sherlock Holmes, the world’s greatest fictional detective and the ultimate unitasker. More often than not, when a new case …
Daniel Kahneman Explains Multitasking
Can we do several things at once? You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding. What happens when we’re trying to do things that are not so simple? It is the mark …
The Myth of Multitasking: Why the Key to Better Work is Developing Forgotten Skills
Of course you can do more than one thing at once. The catch is you can’t do more more than one thing at once that requires concentration. You can walk and chew gum, but you can’t write an …
Multitasking: The Costs of Switching From One Task to Another
You may think that as you juggle emails, my-book, twitter, google, work, life, the phone and casual web surfing that you’re really doing all of that stuff at once, but what you’re really …
The High Cost of Distractions
We tend to think that other people get distracted but not us. We’re different. We’re better than average. We can do more than one thing at a time and still be amazing. Not so. The …