Listening to the SuperFreakonomics audio book I heard a term today that was new to me – “cognitive drift”. The authors used the term to describe our tendency to lose focus on what we’re doing. For example, when we’re looking at a website that is taking too long to use.
A person using a computer experiences “cognitive drift” if more than one second elapses between clicking the mouse and seeing new data on the screen. If ten seconds pass, the person’s mind is somewhere else entirely. That’s how medical errors are made.
Levitt and Dubner, Superfreakonomics
Randy Mayeux wrote a good post about the topic already so I won’t reinvent the wheel, but take a look. There have also been good articles in the WSJ and in Wired magazine on related topics. A friend recommended this article to me and I pass it along to you.
Are any of you working on focusing and “uni-tasking”? Any success stories out there?
image sourced from creativecommons