Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

less stressful Jessica L. Buck, Elizabeth McInnis, and Casey Randolph, The New Frontier of Education: The Impact of Smartphone Technology in the Classroom, American Society for Engineering Education, 2013 ASEE Southeast Section Conference; Neal Lathia et al., “Smartphones for Large-Scale Behavior Change Interventions,” IEEE Pervasive Computing 3 (2013): 66–73; “Sites That Help You Track Your Spending and Saving,” Money Counts: Young Adults and Financial Literacy, NPR, May 18, 2011; Shafiq Qaadri, “Meet a Doctor Who Uses a Digital Health Tracker and Thinks You Should Too,” The Globe and Mail, September 4, 2014; Claire Cain Miller, “Collecting Data on a Good Night’s Sleep,” The New York Times, March 10, 2014; Steven Beasley and Annie Conway, “Digital Media in Everyday Life: A Snapshot of Devices, Behaviors, and Attitudes,” Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, 2011; Adam Tanner, “The Web Cookie Is Dying. Here’s the Creepier Technology That Comes Next,” Forbes, June 17, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/06/17/the-web-cookie-is-dying-heres-the-creepier-technology-that-comes-next/.

harder to decide For more on information overload and information blindness, please see Martin J. Eppler and Jeanne Mengis, “The Concept of Information Overload: A Review of Literature from Organization Science, Accounting, Marketing, MIS, and Related Disciplines,” The Information Society 20, no. 5 (2004): 325–44; Pamela Karr-Wisniewski and Ying Lu, “When More Is Too Much: Operationalizing Technology Overload and Exploring Its Impact on Knowledge Worker Productivity,” Computers in Human Behavior 26, no. 5 (2010): 1061–72; Joseph M. Kayany, “Information Overload and Information Myths,” Itera, n.d., http://www.itera.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/ITERA12_Paper15.pdf; Marta Sinclair and Neal M. Ashkanasy, “Intuition Myth or a Decision-Making Tool?” Management Learning 36, no. 3 (2005): 353–70.

blanket of powder Snow blindness can also refer to a burn of the cornea, which is the front surface of the eye, by ultraviolet B rays.

enroll in 401(k) plans Sheena S. Iyengar, Gur Huberman, and Wei Jiang, “How Much Choice Is Too Much? Contributions to 401(k) Retirement Plans,” Pension Design and Structure: New Lessons from Behavioral Finance (Philadelphia: Pension Research Council, 2004): 83–95.

more than thirty plans In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, Tucker Kuman, a colleague of the paper’s lead author, Sheena Sethi-Iyengar, wrote: “What was observed in the analysis was that, everything else being equal, every ten funds added was associated with a 1.5 percent to 2 percent drop in employee participation rate (peak participation—75%—occurred when 2 funds were offered)….As the offerings increased in number, the decline in participation rates is exacerbated. If you look at the graphic representation [Figure 5–2 in the paper] of the relationship between participation and number of funds offered, you’ll notice we begin to see a steeper decline in participation rates when the number of funds hits about 31.”

information overload Jeanne Mengis and Martin J. Eppler, “Seeing Versus Arguing the Moderating Role of Collaborative Visualization in Team Knowledge Integration,” Journal of Universal Knowledge Management 1, no. 3 (2006): 151–62; Martin J. Eppler and Jeanne Mengis, “The Concept of Information Overload: A Review of Literature from Organization Science, Accounting, Marketing, MIS, and Related Disciplines,” The Information Society 20, no. 5 (2004): 325–44.

“winnowing” or “scaffolding” Fergus I. M. Craik and Endel Tulving, “Depth of Processing and the Retention of Words in Episodic Memory,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 104, no. 3 (1975): 268; Monique Ernst and Martin P. Paulus, “Neurobiology of Decision Making: A Selective Review from a Neurocognitive and Clinical Perspective,” Biological Psychiatry 58, no. 8 (2005): 597–604; Ming Hsu et al., “Neural Systems Responding to Degrees of Uncertainty in Human Decision-Making,” Science 310, no. 5754 (2005): 1680–83.

hardly aware it’s occurring For more on the decision-making aspect of scaffolding and cognition, please see Gerd Gigerenzer and Wolfgang Gaissmaier, “Heuristic Decision Making,” Annual Review of Psychology 62 (2011): 451–82; Laurence T. Maloney, Julia Trommersh?user, and Michael S. Landy, “Questions Without Words: A Comparison Between Decision Making Under Risk and Movement Planning Under Risk,” Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems (2007): 297–313; Wayne Winston, Decision Making Under Uncertainty (Ithaca, N.Y.: Palisade Corporation, 1999); Eric J. Johnson and Elke U. Weber, “Mindful Judgment and Decision Making,” Annual Review of Psychology 60 (2009): 53; Kai Pata, Erno Lehtinen, and Tago Sarapuu, “Inter-Relations of Tutor’s and Peers’ Scaffolding and Decision-Making Discourse Acts,” Instructional Science 34, no. 4 (2006): 313–41; Priscilla Wohlstetter, Amanda Datnow, and Vicki Park, “Creating a System for Data-Driven Decision Making: Applying the Principal-Agent Framework,” School Effectiveness and School Improvement 19, no. 3 (2008): 239–59; Penelope L. Peterson and Michelle A. Comeaux, “Teachers’ Schemata for Classroom Events: The Mental Scaffolding of Teachers’ Thinking During Classroom Instruction,” Teaching and Teacher Education 3, no. 4 (1987): 319–31; Darrell A. Worthy et al., “With Age Comes Wisdom: Decision Making in Younger and Older Adults,” Psychological Science 22, no. 11 (2011): 1375–80; Pat Croskerry, “Cognitive Forcing Strategies in Clinical Decisionmaking,” Annals of Emergency Medicine 41, no. 1 (2003): 110–20; Brian J. Reiser, “Scaffolding Complex Learning: The Mechanisms of Structuring and Problematizing Student Work,” The Journal of the Learning Sciences 13, no. 3 (2004): 273–304; Robert Clowes and Anthony F. Morse, “Scaffolding Cognition with Words,” in Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems (Lund, Sweden: Lund University Cognitive Studies, 2005), 101–5.

Charles Duhigg's books