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Hello, the book I will interpret to you today is “Fast Pace, Slow Life”, which is a book that makes you faster, a tool book that teaches everyone to improve efficiency, save time, and you can achieve “slow life” under “fast pace”.
David Levy, author of “Fast Pace, Slow Life,” is the one who can teach you how to solve this problem. David Levy is a professor at the University of Washington’s School of Information, and his usual job is to study life patterns that make people think more slowly, calmer, and calmer.
The essence of Levy’s course is distilled in this book “Fast Pace, Slow Life”, and he summarizes four effective exercises to help everyone improve efficiency: concentration, multitasking, power off, and Internet “craft”. Let me talk about these four practice methods in detail.
Harvard University did an interesting psychology experiment, the participant needs to watch a video of more than 1 minute, the video of the black and white basketball team passing, the participant needs to remember the number of passes of the white team. At the same time, there is a person dressed as a gorilla and jumping behind the two teams. After watching the video, it turned out that at least half of the people did not see the gorilla at all. You’re probably going to shout, they’re blind, I won’t! But the experiment was repeated several times around the world, and the results were shocking: At least half of the people did not see the gorilla. This story is known as the “invisible gorilla”. Everyone can’t help but ask: how can half of the people not see such a big gorilla? But that’s what it is. Because human attention is selective, it can only focus on limited things, like a flashlight light, shining into a dark room, in this direction, you will see a chair in the corner; A little to the right you can see the coffee table and the lamp above. This beam is very interesting, we can’t see what doesn’t shine, and we don’t feel that it doesn’t exist.
So, can we only notice a limited number of things or things? Not entirely. The author also said that there is another way of our attention, just like another flashlight light, the light diffuses more widely, and this diffusion can see more, but it is not very clear. Of course, most of the time, we are both focused and diffuse, just like when we cross the street, we have to focus on going to the other side of the road, but you also have to be careful of electric vehicles that may pop up at any time, which is focusing and spreading. Has it been said that it is difficult to both focus and diffuse attention? Hey, in fact, this requires skill, you have to consciously choose when to concentrate and when to diffuse, and you must also seize the timing to switch between concentration and diffusion modes. If you can do that, you’ll have the core of the methodology we’ve covered today.
Part I
Let’s start with the first exercise – concentration. Most office workers have to deal with a lot of emails every day, but do you observe your emails? What is an observation email? What’s so nice about the mail? Observing the email here does not mean that you are going to review every word in every email you receive, but rather that you pay attention to how you feel when you see a new email, how these feelings affect you, whether it feels heavy or happy? Does this mood affect what you do next?
Let’s say you come back from a long vacation, and as soon as you open your inbox, there are a dozen or even hundreds of unprocessed emails. Will you collapse? “Ah, so many things, when will this have to be made… Each one seems to be very important, and it feels so troublesome…”Do you feel that the whole person is not good all at once?” Can’t beat the spirit? If you feel it seriously, is your neck stiff? Head tilted forward? The body is so tense that it arches and even holds its breath? These reactions have appeared in the author’s students, who have never noticed that they are so nervous about email, and only after finding that something is wrong with their body do they react, “Hey, I don’t like receiving emails so much…” However, there are also people who are happy to receive a lot of emails, and if you are like this, congratulations on your first step being much smoother than others.
In fact, it is not the email itself that affects us, but the relationship between the person who sent the email and us. If you receive an email from your boss asking you to submit a report at 12 o’clock in the middle of the night and a friend inviting you to go out tomorrow, the pressure must be different. Speaking of which, how you treat emails shows how you deal with interpersonal stress.
Observe your email, here are a few tips to pay attention to, one is that it is not enough to notice the physical reaction and emotional response, you must record all the situations and feelings, so that you can always review and reflect. The second is that it is best to do it with friends, or at least share and discuss with them, which can deepen your thinking and may also motivate more people to practice together. Observation is fundamental to dealing with anything, and once we understand our response to stress, practicing focus comes naturally.
What does focus mean? It’s that we deliberately force ourselves to process and only process mail for a period of time, and no matter what attracts attention, the first thing we do when we come back to our senses is to immediately reprocess the email.
Let’s imagine a scenario where you sit on the couch with your laptop in your hands and relax as much as possible. At this time, the mail came, a total of 28. 28 letters, who are they, send me emails if there is anything to do, there must be a lot of spam. By the way, last time I received Amazon’s advertising email, what did you say? 200 books off 100? I’ll have to hurry up and take a look. So you click on Amazon. Hey, e-books on sale, bag sales, heck, I’ve wanted to buy this one for a long time…
More than half an hour passed. Suddenly you realize something is wrong: Uh, I’m not dealing with mail? Hurry up, hurry up! Oh, this is a wedding invitation from a good friend, getting married on the 20th, must be held. This is the letter from my boss asking me how my project was last week, and I have to think about it. At this time, there was a melodious sound of music in my ears, and my roommate was watching a TV series, no, I couldn’t concentrate. “Little!” You shouted loudly. Okay, it’s all quiet. Oops, Teddy jumped on the couch, touched, it felt so good, while touching, reply. Do you want to buy some dog food while Double 11? Alas, quickly back to the mail. The customer sent me an email to ask about things, the big customer has to be careful to serve, the last time customer A was quite arrogant, really annoying. Alas, mind wandering again.
By the time you finished processing 28 emails, it took a total of more than 1 hour, and your mind wandered back and forth, more than a dozen times before and after. That’s not okay. With focus practice, you can clearly see what your mind is wandering about, and you will be more vigilant in the future to avoid things that may be distracting in advance. And repeating this exercise will strengthen your concentration, just like after practicing in the gym for a long time, the muscles will come out. Focusing more on the task at hand will naturally greatly increase efficiency. When doing these exercises, it is best to record your observations and share them with friends. These will further help you summarize and form your own code of conduct. Not only the processing of emails, but also the processing of information such as SMS, WeChat, and QQ.
Through observation and focusing, we have completed the practice of concentration, and we have to remind everyone not to think about doing it once, starting all over again if you fail, and be curious and open-minded in order to better appreciate the fun.
Part II
Remember the two forms of attention? After talking about focus, there is also diffusion. The second exercise, multitasking, is designed to solve this problem.
The first time we practiced, we better find a helper: mobile phones. Photograph our every move, because there are times when we can’t remember what we did or where we switched from. For example, you originally opened Word, prepared to write an article, and then received emails, brushed Weibo by the way, looked at the circle of friends, glanced at the American drama, and clicked on a push. I remembered that I didn’t drink yogurt, so I took some snacks by the way when I went to the refrigerator to get it. Sit down and wipe your glasses and tidy up your clothes. The phone rang, answered the call, and opened the door at the same time to receive a courier. So many things, who can remember clearly? But why switch, are you conscious or unconscious when switching, are you focused on everything? This will determine the success or failure of the next step.
You need to decide wisely when to switch to what task, and then focus on it. Observing, recording, and sharing is still a must in this exercise. Doing so will give us the triple benefits of high productivity, time saving, and stress reduction. When you consciously switch tasks, you quickly choose the most efficient processing sequence that best suits the actual situation. Because you can face multitasking calmly, you will also be calmer and more disciplined.
Multitasking at work is very similar to this, the key is: 1. Multitasking at the same time; 2. Select one task each time as the main task; 3. Focus on the main task; 4. Grasp the timing of switching. Mastering these 4 steps and multitasking is a simple matter.
After doing the two exercises of concentration and multitasking, it is clear what we said earlier about the two forms of concentration and diffusion of attention. Of course, it is not so easy to use it proficiently, it may not be smooth at first, keep an open mind, and keep practicing to make perfect.
Part III
After talking about the first two exercises, the question arises: it’s all fast, can you still have fun? Absolutely. The third power-off exercise is to teach you to slow down. The so-called “power outage” is to temporarily leave electronic equipment and networks. Just like resting well at night to welcome a new day, a power outage is actually a charge, allowing you to stay energetic and sensitive to your surroundings, so that you can better improve efficiency and concentration, make better use of time, and maximize relaxation (stress reduction). More importantly, we can experience the relationship between ourselves and the network when the power is out, whether we really need it, when we need it, and for how long we need it, and then find a balance between online and offline life. As I said before, we can’t completely get out of the network, so we should look at which network behaviors are beneficial and necessary for us to decide how to make better use of the network later.
Of course, the power outage exercise focuses on two things: which electronic device or website you choose to leave behind, and when to start the power outage. The author reminds us that everyone’s needs for the Internet are different, and we should not copy the practices of others, but should start from our own actual situation.
One important thing is for the three exercises of concentration, multitasking, and power outage: it is best to find a few friends to participate in, so that with multiple viewing angles, you may collide with sparks, and you can also supervise each other.
Part IV
Let’s talk about the last exercise – the craft of surfing the Internet. The author makes an interesting statement, saying that surfing the Internet is also a craft, and constantly honing this craft will go a long way towards improving efficiency.
The book gives the method of honing and consists of 3 stages: preparation, action, and closing. Each stage has corresponding requirements: in the preparation stage, it is necessary to clarify intentions, concentrate, relax, and try to create a distraction-free environment; In the action stage, always remind yourself of the purpose of going online and choose wisely; At the end, review the whole process, recall what affected or helped you, and when it was naturally suspended or terminated, and these three stages form a complete cycle.
See it? This exercise will use the skills of the previous three exercises. In the action stage, it is also important to learn to grasp the timing of choice, when you consciously practice choosing or not choosing, you are in control of your online activities, this feeling of “everything is in my control” will make us feel better, and this confidence will quietly reduce stress. In previous exercises, the author has repeatedly emphasized the importance of observation, which is the focus of the closing phase. Most importantly, the ability to pause and terminate is at the heart of all exercises, stopping for a better start.
summary
The above is the core content of “Fast Pace, Slow Life”, this book tells us through 4 exercises that in a fast-paced world, if you want to enjoy a slow life, it is best to learn how to deal with the fast pace: hone your online skills, concentrate on everything, and multi-use at the same time, choose a good time to switch, and feel life by cutting off power from time to time, which is the best slow life skill. Did you get it? At the end of the book, there are also two small attention exercises and record templates, you can start trying.
