To defeat these enemies, Newport suggests a variety of tactics meant to slice out distractions and “wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.” This promise is highly appealing for people in my exact category of intelligence, which is: just smart enough to know that we fall far short of how smart we’d wish to be. Newport, an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University, also includes texting, social media and “the shiny tangle of infotainment sites like BuzzFeed and Reddit” in the category of things that disrupt our attention spans. The only way out of these anxieties, especially if your job depends upon connectivity, is through them: We must get better at managing our entanglements with technology.Ĭal Newport’s DEEP WORK: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Grand Central, $28) argues that dithering on our phones and inboxes incinerates our ability to focus on activities of cognitive worth. Many of us couldn’t quit email any more than we could quit electricity or running water. The same is true of email, but email has now acquired the status of a utility. It should be banished from my life, yet I do not have the courage to evict it. The iPhone is a bad tenant: It makes disturbing noises, it keeps me up at night, it devours my attention, it costs me dearly. ![]() I’m reminded of this every time I spot my iPhone on my desk or bedside table, or hurtling around in my purse. He deemed it a “bad-looking tenant” and recommended immediate surgical removal. ![]() ![]() In 1893, Grover Cleveland’s doctor peered into the president’s mouth and discovered a tumor.
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