Multitasking and not taking time to think

How could a blog post titled Learn how to think avoid my praise?  This post made the Farnam Street Blog top 10 for 2015.  The post refers to a wonderful essay – Solitude and Leadership By William Deresiewicz.  On first reading (and this essay deserves several reads) two concepts resonated strongly. Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. We know that multitasking does not really work.  This concept has great importance in medicine.  We have added so many tasks to the patient interaction that the thought process can suffer.  Our focus can get split often. I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing. All too often we see diagnostic errors occur because we do not take the time to...
Source: DB's Medical Rants - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Tags: Medical Rants Source Type: blogs