Читать книгу Sort Your Brain Out - Джек Льюис, Адриан Вебстер - Страница 34

Smartphones are a constant source of unintended distraction, which can derail your productivity no end. “Unintended” is the critical word here because “intended” distractions are ideal for shifting gear into a different brain state. Creative thinking can really benefit from a bit of well‐timed distraction, especially when a person's brain is cluttered with anxious thoughts and stuck in rigid ruts, while tussling with seemingly unsolvable problems. Intentional distractions – those that happen at a time of our choosing – can help you to refocus the cognitive machinery and let the ideas flow more freely.

The problem with unintended distractions, like those caused by smartphone alerts notifying you about every text message, email, call or social networking update, is that your attention is repeatedly pulled away from your thought processes. Each time that happens you are robbed of the opportunity to see your train of thought through to its natural conclusion. If you allow tech to constantly interrupt your thought processes, all those distractions add up to a large bill of switch costs, many missed Eureka moments and an unproductive day at the office.

But don't our ever‐changing brains constantly adapt to help us perform better in any given environment? Surely brain pathways will be reconfigured to help us block out these minor distractions? To a certain degree, yes, this is possible – but in the absence of a tailored, intensive, training regime aimed at achieving this specific end result, it's extremely unlikely to happen by chance. It makes much more sense to switch your devices to silent, whenever possible, so that you can choose when you interrupt your flow to check for messages and missed calls.