Actually, as Davidson argues, multitasking helps us see more and do more, and experience texts and tasks in different ways. There’s no evidence that anyone ever was deeply reading for hours on end with no interruptions. All we have are claims from Plato saying that writing is going to kill our ability to memorize. Our minds have always been wandering; we’ve always been distractible. We’ve always been doodling on the sides of pages, or thinking about our lunch, or stopping to converse with someone. Now we just have distraction that’s more readily available and purposefully attuned to distracting us — like popup ads, notifications; things that quite literally fly across your screen to distract you. But the fact that we have students who have grown up with those and have trained themselves to deal with those in such interesting ways is something that I think we should bring into the classroom and be talking about and critically thinking about

Musician John Mayer, too, describes his typewriter as more of an emotional companion than a logistical tool. He laments writing lyrics with the judgemental “red squiggly line” of spell check, which he says stops the creative process because he feels compelled to fix the error, and turning to a typewriter which “doesn’t judge you, it just goes, ‘right away, sir, right away’.”

Increasing your use of tools without increasing your exposure to distractions is a great way to increase your abilities and get a lot more done.

aviation experts haddevised a solution to the problem of pilot interruption: the “sterile cockpit rule.”Instituted by the Federal Aviation Administration in 1981, the rule forbids pilotsfrom engaging in conversation unrelated to the immediate business of flyingwhen the plane is below ten thousand feet.

One study found that while doing online research, students who used matrix-style notes and were given time limits were much less likely to become distracted by other online material than students without those conditions (Wu, & Xie, 2018).

I was suddenly deluged with ads for “the world’s thinnest tablet,” which promised not only to replace pen and paper but to help you “Get Your Brain Back.” The company’s Lovecraftian promotional ad, which has racked up nearly three million views, begins with a hissing demon-child clinging to her iPad and proceeds through an animated hellscape complete with attention-sucking brain tubes and notifications circling like sharks. The narrator quavers an ominous warning: “We have to modify technology, or else it will modify us.”

A recent review of the evidence finds that when students are cognitively overloaded, they disengage more often, perform badly and learn less. You can help students stay focused by making your presentations less cognitively overloaded. So, shorten slides, reduce text, use diagrams, remove irrelevant images, progressively reveal content and stick to one idea per slide. Take a careful look at the materials you use and ask yourself: “What’s my main message? What distracts from that? How can I remove distractions?”

Do Not Disturb Get rid of any and all notifications for however long you like. Cast out ye heathens, for there is many a work to be done!

Every account I read reflected a rigidly packed day where the layer of people around the HSPs acted as an attentional filter, only bringing the most important piece of information into the focus of the celebrity. I don’t care for being rich, but I really care for being focused. Not all of us have a personal chef who switches the nutrition every ten days and attends to all our dietary needs. Hence in the absence of the swarm of people who act as a second brain, it is upon us to build our own.