We Have A Thinking Problem
Are you guilty of skim thinking?
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Ping.
Ding.
Push.
You’ve heard enough about the relentless attention grabbing.
The people who knew how to get stuff done 20 or 30 years ago knew how to multi-task. Now the desired skill is the exact opposite: mono-tasking.
Thinking of one thing and doing it. That’s what we lack.
In his book, The Mind, Dr. Richard Restak coined the term “skim thinking.” He also says this about multi-tasking:
“Despite our subjective feelings to the contrary, our brains work at their best when focus on one thing at a time. Multitasking results in inefficient shifts in our attention.”
We’ve heard that before. We know it’s bad, but what are we supposed to do? The emails, checklists and blog posts (!) must be written.
What we’re losing though even in those small amounts of productivity is a greater problem. Are we failing the collective good? Are we falling short on the “big ideas”? This, of course, is impossible to measure. We don’t know what we’re not thinking of. But the truth is we’re not spending enough time thinking.
Restak continues:
“Depth, clarity and cohesion of thought take time and require focused attention. Failures in any of these factors lead to degradation in the quality of knowledge. Skim-talking and skim-reading lead to skim-thinking.”
Focused attention. Clarity. Cohesion of thought. Those all take the time that we don’t seem to have anymore.
Or maybe we do have the time. And we’re scared to use it that way. Because it’s unusual for us to do anything but skim. Cohesive thoughts are foreign to everything around us and to ourselves.
At least when Restak wrote his book in the 90s, some generations remembered how to think deeply and cohesively. That’s not a memory for most of us; we have never done it.
Skim thinking may be the only thing we know how to do well.
