Saved by Jonathan Simcoe
The Ability to Concentrate Is Increasing?!
That problem is distraction. After all, it hardly matters how committed you are to making the best use of your limited time if, day after day, your attention gets wrenched away by things on which you never wanted to focus.
Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
“If you check e-mail while you talk to someone you lose forty IQ points,” he says. “People can’t multitask. It’s not possible. I think attention is a big, big issue. People are addicted to their Crackberries. You’ve got to make the systems so that they help people pay attention to the world in front of them.”
Clive Thompson • Smarter Than You Think
While the ability to rapidly communicate using digital messages is useful, the frequent disruptions created by this behavior also make it hard to focus, which has a bigger impact on our ability to produce valuable output than we may have realized.
Cal Newport • A World Without Email
Research by Microsoft amongst 2,000 people in Canada showed that the ability to sustain focused attention in the face of distractions had dropped to just eight seconds in 2015 – down from 12 seconds in the year 2000, before the explosion of online images, videos and mobile screens.
Darren Bridger • Neuro Design: Neuromarketing Insights to Boost Engagement and Profitability
[Patricia Greenfield] concluded that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies has led to the “widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills.” We can, for example, rotate objects in our minds better than we used to be able to. But our “n... See more
Nicholas Carr • The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Just seeing your phone can be enough to make your brain wonder what you’re missing—did you just get a text message, a post, or an email? This kind of micro distraction can have a significant impact on brain performance.