“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.”
― Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention
― Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention
“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”
― Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention
― Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention
“John’s was a lived and practical wisdom. “The self-renewing man,” he wrote, “looks forward to an endless and unpredictable dialogue between his potentialities and the claims of life—not only the claims he encounters but the claims he invents.” He was a half century older than me, but John’s enduring curiosity, his sense of possibility and willingness to try made him seem the youngest person I knew. So, just start.”
― Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World
― Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World
“Strategically, as my friend and founding Acumen board member Stuart Davidson says, “If you want advice, ask for money. If you want to raise money, ask for advice.” We all yearn to be recognized.”
― Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World
― Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World
“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.”
― Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention
― Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention
Jehan’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Jehan’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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