Tom explores hair-trigger multitasking, the modern habit of juggling tasks with split attention, and argues that real insight comes from knowing what to overlook. William James said wisdom is deciding what to ignore; Malcolm Gladwell called it blink decisions. A Zen saying suggests extending boring activities reveals hidden value.
Hey guys, it's Tom. I just read a blog post that I wanted to just briefly talk to you about. It was by Bruce Sterling, who's a brilliant writer, science fiction, design, lots of stuff. And he was talking about another blogger who had come up with a phrase called, that he called, hair-trigger multitasking. And you know, hair-trigger multitasking was just such a great phrase because it really hit me with That's where we're living right now. We're living in this world of, you know, we're doing 5 things at once and we're doing them all with this kind of split attention that we have for everything. You know, a little of this, a little of that, look at that, watch this. And we can only pay so much attention to any one thing. And as we're doing it, we're kind of going through this routine of, come on, come on, come on, get on with it, let's go, get on with it, let's have it. Quick, quick, quick. And it's a— and the hair-trigger part is, sorry, too long, that's too long, takes too long, too slow, too long. And I was contrasting that with a quote that I read in an article about wisdom by William James. William James is one of the great American psychologists, and James's quote was, the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. So in an era when hair-trigger multitasking is the order of the day, knowing what to overlook becomes what Malcolm Gladwell called in his book a blink decision. So now we make decisions about what to overlook very quickly And often, I'm sure, prematurely, because there's this other great phrase that has always kind of stayed with me by a Zen master who said, "If something is boring for 10 minutes, do it for 20." And that always struck me as one of those pieces of wisdom about time and about activity that could stick with me. Because a lot of times we don't see the beauty, the wonder, the value of something in a blink, in a hair-trigger, multitasking way. But we have to stay with a little bit. We have to listen to the symphony a second time. We have to watch the movie that was not obvious a little more closely and spend a little more time with it. That's my thought. My thought is this is really different to live our lives in this hair-trigger multitasking world, and what's it doing to us? What's it doing to our relationships? What's it doing to the things that we value? I don't know, except I know that it's having an effect on us. So take it easy. Bye.
