“Spending the majority of your day with fragmented attention can permanently affect your ability to sustain concentration.”

This is something that Cal Newport, associate professor at Georgetown University, said in a TED Talk about why he has never had a social media account and why he turns off his notifications while he’s working on a project.

He talks and writes about the impact that social media and multiple sources of information have on our work habits, productivity, and ability to concentrate. His premise is that jumping from email to Facebook to Slack feed, whether at work or at home, impairs our ability to actually do what we need to do in an efficient way as well as affecting our overall ability to sustain attention.

He calls shifting from doing a task at work to looking at an email a “context shift.” In an interview in the New York Times Magazine (January 29, 2023), he said that “even minor context shifts are poison”—by which he meant that if you are writing a report at work and you stop to check a text message, there will be a cost to your productivity. You will have to exert a large amount of mental energy to go from that message back to the report you were writing. And if you do this multiple times while writing the report, you will take longer and have to work harder to finish it.

And he did not make this........

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