Number of words: 95 This combination of sound proofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported. It’s a setup that straddles a spectrum where on one extreme we find the solo thinker, isolated from inspiration but free from distraction, … Read more

Numbe of words: 275 And yet, these open office designs are not embraced haphazardly. As Maria Konnikova reports in The New Yorker , when this concept first emerged, its goal was to “facilitate communication and idea flow.” This claim resonated with American businesses looking to embrace an aura of start-up unconventionality. Josh Tyrangiel, the editor … Read more

Number of words: 852 Consider a 2012 study, led by psychologists Wilhelm Hofmann and Roy Baumeister, that outfitted 205 adults with beepers that activated at randomly selected times (this is the experience sampling method discussed in Part 1). When the beeper sounded, the subject was asked to pause for a moment to reflect on desires … Read more

Number of words: 483 Our second argument for why depth generates meaning comes from the work of one of the world’s best-known (and most misspelled) psychologists, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In the early 1980s, Csikszentmihalyi, working with Reed Larson, a young colleague at the University of Chicago, invented a new technique for understanding the psychological impact of … Read more

Number of words: 158 Scientists can watch this effect in action all the way down to the neurological level. Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen, to name one such example, used an fMRI scanner to study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery. She found that for young people, their amygdala (a … Read more

Number of words: 162 A foundation for our answer can be found in a warning provided by the late communication theorist and New York University professor Neil Postman. Writing in the early 1990s, as the personal computer revolution first accelerated, Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, … Read more

Number of words: 710 To return to our question about why cultures of connectivity persist, the answer, according to our principle, is because it’s easier. There are at least two big reasons why this is true. The first concerns responsiveness to your needs. If you work in an environment where you can get an answer … Read more

Number of words: 445 Tom Cochran’s experiment yielded an interesting result about the literal cost of a seemingly harmless behavior. But the real importance of this story is the experiment itself, and in particular, its complexity. It turns out to be really difficult to answer a simple question such as: What’s the impact of our … Read more

Number of words: 338 In a 2009 paper, titled, intriguingly, “Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?,” Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking—trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously—on performance, but that in the modern … Read more