Jehan Manekshaw

“We now use our phones so habitually that I don’t think we consider doing a task and checking our phones at the same time as multitasking, any more than we think scratching your butt during a work call is multitasking. But it is. Simply having your phone switched on and receiving texts every ten minutes while you try to work is itself a form of switching – and these costs start to kick in for you too. One study at the Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Lab took 136 students and got them to sit a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20 percent worse.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention

“Nationalism may begin with ideas among the elite but its propagation involves having mass support. Initially, anti-colonial”
― Romila Thapar, On Nationalism

“worse. The second way switching harms your attention is what we might call the screw-up effect. When you switch between tasks, errors that wouldn’t have happened otherwise start to creep in, because – Earl explained – ‘your brain is error-prone. When you switch from task to task, your brain has to backtrack a little bit and pick up and figure out where it left off’ – and it can’t do that perfectly. Glitches start to occur. ‘Instead of spending critical time really doing deep thinking, your thinking is more superficial, because you’re spending a lot of time correcting errors and backtracking.’ Then”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention

“The study found that ‘technological distraction’ – just getting emails and calls – caused a drop in the workers’ IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that’s twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests in terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention