As if I needed more fodder to convince myself as to why I shut off all notifications on my phone, tablet, and computer. Clay Shirky wrote an excellent piece on Medium about why he has changed his mind and now asks his students to close their laptops and put away their phones.
Here is a bit about multi-tasking:
On top of this, multi-tasking doesn’t even exercise task-switching as a skill. 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 think I’m going to double-down on “distraction free” by attempting to only keep the applications I’m using open and closing all others.
/via Michael Lopp.