Poverty of attention

I attended an all day course based on The Energy Project here at work recently - it was the usual stuff you might expect (get at least 7 hours sleep, take regular breaks etc) but as our facilitator said it was all "common knowledge but not common practice"; it was great to take a day out to un-tether ourselves from our mobiles and laptops and just think about the way we work.

No phones allowed

One quote that particularly stood out for me was this one from Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize winner who said this back in 1978 - though his words are more pertinent than ever now:

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.  Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overbalance of information sources that might consume it."