Patients are telling a physician I know that they are "self medicating" with drugs for attention deficit disorder or narcolepsy to keep up with their work. A lawyer tells him, "If I didn't take this, I couldn't read contracts." Once patients needed a diagnosis for such prescriptions; now for many those medications have be come routine performance enhancers. Growing numbers of teen agers are faking symptoms of attention deficit to get prescriptions for stimulants, a chemical route to attentiveness.
And Tony Schwartz, a consultant who coaches leaders on how to best manage their energy, tells me, "We get people to become more aware of how they use attention-which is always poorly. At tention is now the number-one issue on the minds of our clients."
The onslaught of incoming data leads to sloppy shortcuts, like triaging email by heading, skipping much of voice mails, skimming messages and memos. It's not just that we've developed habits of at tention that make us less effective, but that the weight of messages leaves us too little time simply to reflect on what they really mean.
All of this was foreseen way back in 1977 by the Nobel-winning
economist Herbert Simon. Writing about the coming information rich world, he warned that what information consumes is "the at tention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."9
Patients are telling a physician I know that they are "self medicating" with drugs for attention deficit disorder or narcolepsy to keep up with their work. A lawyer tells him, "If I didn't take this, I couldn't read contracts." Once patients needed a diagnosis for such prescriptions; now for many those medications have be come routine performance enhancers. Growing numbers of teen agers are faking symptoms of attention deficit to get prescriptions for stimulants, a chemical route to attentiveness.
And Tony Schwartz, a consultant who coaches leaders on how to best manage their energy, tells me, "We get people to become more aware of how they use attention-which is always poorly. At tention is now the number-one issue on the minds of our clients."
The onslaught of incoming data leads to sloppy shortcuts, like triaging email by heading, skipping much of voice mails, skimming messages and memos. It's not just that we've developed habits of at tention that make us less effective, but that the weight of messages leaves us too little time simply to reflect on what they really mean.
All of this was foreseen way back in 1977 by the Nobel-winning
economist Herbert Simon. Writing about the coming information rich world, he warned that what information consumes is "the at tention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."9
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