Dr. Cal Newport

It's also this network switching cost.

Because the phone is very good at inducing a network switch, and that's an expensive, time-consuming, energy-consuming neuronal operation.

Task switching.

I'm going to switch my focus of attention from this to that.

We can't do that.

in two seconds, right?

That's a hard process.

It takes a while.

It's why when you sit down to work on something really hard, you have that feeling of for the first 15 minutes, this is terrible, you know?

And then after like 15 or 20 minutes, you sort of get into the groove.

I always assumed part of what's going on is it takes a while for your brain to really start marshaling, okay, so what semantic networks do we need to start activating here?

Oh, we don't need this.

Let's inhibit this.

We're not doing that anymore.

It takes a while.

So what happens then when you have a lot of these quick checks to social media, you're jumping in on email back and forth, is you have this disaster, catastrophic pileup of aborted task switches happening, right?

And so it's not just the total time you're looking at, let's say, email or social media.

It's the 15-minute window you have to add around each of those checks in which you have this cognitive disorder.

That really adds up.

And then you realize, oh, there was no time during my day.