Dont distract me html 1 by Corny Poems Inc.

Book Review HELP DESK

Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Distract Me

NISHANT CHOKSI

SUBSCRIBE | LOG IN

By MOLLY YOUNG JANUARY 26, 2016

In 1893, Grover Cleveland’s doctor peered into the president’s mouth and discovered a tumor. He deemed it a “bad-looking tenant” and recommended immediate surgical removal. I’m reminded of this every time I spot my iPhone on my desk or bedside table, or hurtling around in my purse. The iPhone is a bad tenant: It makes disturbing noises, it keeps me up at night, it devours my attention, it costs me dearly. It should be banished from my life, yet I do not have the courage to evict it. The same is true of email, but email has now acquired the status of a utility. Many of us couldn’t quit email any more than we could quit electricity or running water. 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. Cal 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. 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. 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. ADVERTISEMENT

Newport’s suggestions are concrete. Create a visual scorecard of the time you spend engaged in focused work, like a calendar with tick marks. Change your default email habit to “no response,” excepting the few emails that truly matter. Keep a notepad next to your computer at work and schedule the periods of time when

you’re allowed to use the Internet. The rest of the day, stay away. If you have a mountainous task to vanquish, consider the “grand gesture” approach: When J. K. Rowling found herself struggling to complete the final book in her Harry Potter series, she booked a suite at the five-star Balmoral hotel in Edinburgh and stayed there until her book was finished. Your gesture can be cheaper. As a presence on the page, Newport is exceptional in the realm of self-help authors. He is not an obvious maniac. His writing isn’t befouled by stylistic abuses. He has not granted himself a job title featuring the word “guru” or “maven.” Partly for these reasons and partly because his diagnoses rang true, I bought in to “Deep Work.” Six pages in, I powered down my laptop. Twenty pages in, I left the house to buy an alarm clock so that I wouldn’t have an excuse to sleep next to my phone. A hundred pages in, I asked my brother to change my Twitter password so that I could no longer log in to my account. Nothing like starting the new year off with a renunciatory spree! David M. Levy’s MINDFUL TECH: How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives (Yale University, $28) proposes a Zen solution. Levy is a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, an alumnus of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and the possessor of a Ph.D. in computer science as well as a diploma in calligraphy and bookbinding, which is arguably the coolest set of accreditations a human can have at this point in history. A photo on his website depicts Levy sitting near a pond, hands folded, tranquilly half-smiling. He looks like a man who has never walked into a pole while texting. Levy’s attitude toward connectivity is gentler than Newport’s. “Whatever their problematic side,” he writes, our digital devices “are undeniably powerful and useful.” Rather than tutoring us to renounce the Internet, he advises moderation. Mindfulness exercises dotted throughout the book instruct a reader to train her attention on what she is doing and how she feels as she’s doing it, noticing each fluttering thought with dispassion. You’ve logged in to your email. How do you feel? Has your breathing turned shallow? Has your posture changed? Does your elbow hurt? Could you use some Chapstick? Are you checking email as an avoidance mechanism because you have an unpleasant task to complete? Are you toggling among 10 browser tabs? Are you aware of your choices? If not, are they really “choices” at all, or do they fit into some other category of action, perhaps closer to a flinch? Is your

day woven from the fabric of a million flinches? Is your attention span, like mine, so fragmented that you can’t even put together a coherent metaphor? Strenuous thinking has always required humans to distance themselves from daily trifles — after all, Jane Austen didn’t spend all day pumping out handwritten epistles to her sister (the Georgian equivalent of Gchat). Newport’s and Levy’s books are ultimately more concerned with the pursuit of an examined life than with the specific perils of technology. The same cannot be said of Chris Bailey’s THE PRODUCTIVITY PROJECT: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy (Crown Business, $26). “While some people have normal interests like sports, music and cooking, as strange as it might sound, I have always been obsessed with becoming as productive as possible,” he writes. This is, indeed, a strange thing to put forth, because productivity — like diligence or stamina — is a method, not a virtue. Bailey says he intends to explore the notion of productivity, which feels like the kind of circuitous task Kramer might have undertaken in a discarded “Seinfeld” plot pitched by an intern who had been misreading Samuel Beckett.

At any rate, Bailey turned down a couple of job offers after college to spend a year researching and blogging about productivity. Each chapter of the book is prefaced by an “Estimated Reading Time,” alerting readers that they should expect to spend approximately seven minutes and two seconds poring over Chapter 8, for example. The author’s productivity experiments include watching 296 TED Talks in a week, gaining 10 pounds of lean muscle mass and waking up at 5:30 a.m. for a period of time. Bailey doesn’t make a distinction between the productivity that Newport and Levy herald — work that involves creative deliberation or civic engagement or in some way contributes to the human endeavor — and what many of us would call “life hacks.” But the Internet is already full of life hacks. Why aggregate them into a book? ADVERTISEMENT

For David Pogue, formerly a technology columnist for The New York Times, the answer is obvious: because most life hacks prove useless, dumb, tacky or obvious, and someone needs to winnow down the pile. POGUE’S BASICS. LIFE: Essential Tips and

Shortcuts (That No One Bothers to Tell You) (Flatiron, $19.99) is a master class in the quotidian arts, revealing how to remove gum from clothing (freeze it), sharpen scissors instantly (cut through a piece of sandpaper) and improvise a portable speaker (stick your phone in a coffee mug). Roughly a third of the tips struck me as obvious, a third struck me as genius, and a third moved me to annotate the page with TELL DAD. Only a handful of Pogue’s tips involve anything digital, but his approach is informed by the tech mind-set that the best solution to a problem is often the most minimal. What Pogue offers are keyboard shortcuts for the interface of life. Or cheat codes, maybe. He reminds us that technology is neither blessing nor evil, but a tool whose utility depends upon its wielder — technology is not the tumor, in other words, but the scalpel.

Molly Young writes Critical Shopper columns for The Times’s Thursday Styles section and features for New York magazine.