Oompf, Right in the Procrastination Button

A study from Stanford reports that heavy multi-taskers are worse at choosing which task to focus on. (“They are suckers for irrelevancy”, as Cliff Nass, one of the researchers put it.) Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.”

I fight with procrastination and focus every day. Clay Shirky lays out his reasons for removing laptops from the classroom. Mind you, Professor Shirky teaches “social and cultural effects of the internet and mobile phones”. The focus of his classes is technology, but it’s getting in the way!

On Stories and Memorization

Knowing the stories isn’t memorization. Once you know the stories you know how one thing causes another, how things are related and reflected, and you can think about the present and the future. And you end up knowing pretty well when things happened — because you know how things fit together — even if you don’t recall every single precise date and the names of every player.

Brent Simmons on why memorization isn’t just to remember facts, but to tell stories.