Divided Attention

From Daniel Levitin, writing in The New York Times:

“Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.

If you want to be more productive and creative, and to have more energy, the science dictates that you should partition your day into project periods. Your social networking should be done during a designated time, not as constant interruptions to your day.”

Some seemingly common sense stuff about dedicating our brain to one activity or task at a time. It’s easy to get swept up in notifications and alerts, but at a certain point (and often fairly quickly, it seems) those things that we think are making us more productive are actually dividing our attention and making it even harder for us to get things done.