Learning & Mind · Foundation

Focus and Deep Work

This is among the most advised-about subjects in the genre and one of the least settled. The course goes to what has been measured: what an interruption does to the work and to the person, how often a mind is elsewhere when nobody has interrupted it, what happened to two famous claims about devices when somebody pooled the studies, and whether anything calling itself attention training transfers to anything. It is the third course of the term on running yourself, after Habits and Self-Discipline, and it takes up the half of attention that Time Management and Habits both stopped short of: not what to do with your hours, and not how to make a behaviour automatic, but what happens inside the hour itself.

What you'll learn

• Distinguish the two instruments this subject uses, self-report and task performance, and say why the same question answered by each can give different results
• State what an interruption was measured to cost, with its scope, and explain why a measure of time and errors alone misses it
• Say what the experience-sampling study established about mind-wandering, and what its time-lag analysis does and does not show about causation
• Read a pooled result and a publication-bias correction, and say what happened to the media-multitasking effect when one was applied
• State what the evidence does and does not show about whether attention can be trained, using the distinction between near and far transfer
• Sort a claim about attention into measurable, unmeasurable as stated, or false, and say which instrument would have had to produce it