Ikigai : the Japanese secret to a long and happy life pdfdrive com

Vague Objective	C learly Defined Objective and a Focus on Process
Obsessive Desire to Achieve a Goal While Ignoring Process

Confusion; time and energy wasted on Fixation on the objective rather than getting Confusion; time and energy wasted on Fixation on the objective rather than getting

meaningless tasks	Flow	down to business
Mental block	Flow	Mental block

Strategy 3: C oncentrate on a single task

This is perhaps one of the greatest obstacles we face today, with so much technology and so many distractions. We’re listening to a video on Y ouTube while writing an e-mail, when suddenly a chat prompt pops up and we answer it. Then our smartphone vibrates in our pocket; just as soon as we respond to that message, we’re back at our computer, logging on to Facebook.
Pretty soon thirty minutes have passed, and we’ve forgotten what the e-mail we were writing was supposed to be about.
This also happens sometimes when we put on a movie with dinner and don’t realize how delicious the salmon was until we’re taking the last bite.
We often think that combining tasks will save us time, but scientific evidence shows that it has the opposite effect. Even those who claim to be good at multitasking are not very productive. In fact, they are some of the least productive people.
Our brains can take in millions of bits of information but can only actually process a few dozen per second. When we say we’re multitasking, what we’re really doing is switching back and forth between tasks very quickly. Unfortunately, we’re not computers adept at parallel processing. We end up spending all our energy alternating between tasks, instead of focusing on doing one of them well.
Concentrating on one thing at a time may be the single most important factor in achieving flow.
According to Csikszentmihalyi, in order to focus on a task we need:

1. 
   To be in a distraction-free environment
   
2. 
   To have control over what we are doing at every moment
   

Technology is great, if we’re in control of it. It’s not so great if it takes control of us. For example, if you have to write a research paper, you might sit down at your computer and use Google to look up the information you need. However, if you’re not very disciplined, you might end up surfing the Web instead of writing that paper. In that case, Google and the Internet will have taken over, pulling you that paper. In that case, Google and the Internet will have taken over, pulling you out of your state of flow.
It has been scientifically shown that if we continually ask our brains to switch back and forth between tasks, we waste time, make more mistakes, and remember less of what we’ve done.
Several studies conducted at Stanford University by Clifford Ivar Nass describe our generation as suffering from an epidemic of multitasking. One such study analyzed the behavior of hundreds of students, dividing them into groups based on the number of things they tended to do at once. The students who were the most addicted to multitasking typically alternated among more than four tasks; for example, taking notes while reading a textbook, listening to a podcast, answering messages on their smartphone, and sometimes checking their Twitter timeline.
Each group of students was shown a screen with several red and several blue arrows. The objective of the exercise was to count the red arrows.
At first, all the students answered correctly right away, without much trouble. As the number of blue arrows increased (the number of red arrows stayed the same; only their position changed), however, the students accustomed to multitasking had serious trouble counting the red arrows in the time allotted, or as quickly as the students who did not habitually multitask, for one very simple reason: They got distracted by the blue arrows! Their brains were trained to pay attention to every stimulus, regardless of its importance, while the brains of the other students were trained to focus on a single task—in this case, counting the red arrows and ignoring the blue ones.⁵
Other studies indicate that working on several things at once lowers our productivity by at least 60 percent and our IQ by more than ten points.
One study funded by the Swedish Council for Working L ife and Social Research found that a sample group of more than four thousand young adults between the ages of twenty and twenty-four who were addicted to their smartphones got less sleep, felt less connected to their community at school, and were more likely to show signs of depression.⁶