Ellen Goodman in an essay talking about how mistakes are made in journalism as well as in medicine [See How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman, which she calls "a disturbing and thoughtful book of essays"] she talks about the need to slow down against the clock.

Who hasn’t felt overwhelmed by push or excess multi-tasking? What do you do to slow things down?

Perhaps the main thing is to realize when it is happening — realizing your limitations, when you need to slow things down, take a deep breath, and think. Remove yourself from the confusion, either by physically removing yourself, changing the environment (teaching your kids to let you think, for example, instead of occupying your every thought) or getting quiet within yourself so you can listen. Removing yourself from rumor mills can also be helpful if they are challenging your thought process.

Karin

The enemy of thinking is speed. “In order to think well, especially in hectic circumstances,” wrotes [Jerome] Groopman, “you need to slow things down to avoid making cognitive errors.”

Just the opposite is happening in medicine, in business, and in journalism where every second brings a deadline….research by scientists studying the human brain suggests that multitasking may not be the time saver we think…just increases the chance of making mistakes.

The collective pressure of technology and the marketplace have ratcheted up the expectation that we can think at the same pace we can press the send button. We are expected to make sense of information as fast as we can communicate it.

“In the ecology of our lives,” says Groopman, “time is the vanishing element.”

When the chief product of ‘productivity’ is a bumper crop of mistakes…we finally have a strong reason to push back against the clock…to slow down — our doctors and ourselves — long enough to notice the shoes under the table. [referring to a reporter who thought Ruth Ginsberg was ill, rather than searching for her shoe under the table] Ellen Goodman

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Categories:

Just thinking, Quotations

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