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What does it mean to spend our time well?

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I spend a lot of my time

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thinking about how to spend my time.

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Probably too much.

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I probably obsess over it --

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my friends think I do.

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But I feel like I kind of have to,

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because these days,

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it feels like little bits of my time
kind of slip away from me,

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and when that happens,

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it feels like parts of my life
are slipping away.

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Specifically,

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it feels like little bits of my time get
slipped away to various things like this:

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like technology --

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I check things --

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I'll give you an example.

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If this email shows up --

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how many of you have gotten
an email like this, right?

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I've been tagged in a photo.

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When this appears,

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I can't help but click on it right now.

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Right?

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Because what if it's a bad photo?

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So I have to click it right now.

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But I'm not sure going to click the photo,

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what I'm actually going to do
is spend the next 20 minutes.

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(Laughter)

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But the worst part is

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that I know that this
is what's going to happen

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and even knowing that that's
what's going to happen

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doesn't stop me from
doing it again the next time.

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Or I find myself in a situation like this:

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where I check my email and pull
down to refresh,

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right?

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But the thing is that 60 seconds later,

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I'll pull down to refresh again.

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Like, why am I doing this?

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Right?

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This doesn't make any sense.

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But I'll give you a hint
why this is happening.

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What do you think makes more money
in the United States

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than movies, game parks
and baseball combined?

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Slot machines.

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How can slot machines make all this money

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when we play with such small
amounts of money?

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We play with coins,

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how is this possible?

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Well, the thing is ...

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my phone is a slot machine.

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Every time I check my phone,

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I'm playing the slot machine to see:

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what am I going to get?

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What am I going to get?

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Every time I check my email,

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I'm playing the slot machine

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to say, "What am I going to get?"

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Every time I scroll a news feed,

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I'm playing the slot machine to see:

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what am I going to get next?

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Right?

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And the thing is that again, knowing
exactly how this works --

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and I'm a designer,

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I know exactly how
the psychology of this works,

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I know exactly what's going on --

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but it doesn't leave me with any choice,

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I still just get sucked into it.

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So what are we going to do?

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Because it leaves us

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with this all or nothing relationship
with technology, right?

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You're either on,

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and your connected
and distracted all the time,

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or you're off,

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but then you're wondering,

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am I missing something important?

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In other words,

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you're either distracted

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or you have Fear of Missing Out,

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right?

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So we need to restore choice.

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We want to have
a relationship with technology

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that gives us back choice
about how we spend time with it,

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and we're going to need
help from designers.

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Because knowing this stuff doesn't help,

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we're going to need design help.

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So what would that look like?

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So let's take an example that we all face:

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chat --

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text messaging.

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So let's say there's two people,

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Nancy's on the left and she's
working on a document,

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and John's on the right.

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And John suddenly remembers,

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"I need to ask Nancy for
that document before I forget!"

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Right?

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So when he sends her that message,

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it blows away her attention.

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Right?

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And that's what we're doing all the time,

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we're bullzodering each other's
attention left and right.

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And there's serious cost to this,

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because every time
we interrupt each other,

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it's takes up about 23 minutes on average
to refocus our attention.

103
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We actually cycle through
two different projects

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before we come back to the
original thing we were doing.

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This is Gloria Mark's research

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combined with Microsoft's
research that shows this.

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And her research also shows
that it actually trains bad habits.

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The more interruptions we get externally,

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it's conditioning and training us
to interrupt ourselves.

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We actually self-interrupt
every three and a half minutes.

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This is crazy,

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so how to fix this?

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Because Nancy and John are in this
all or nothing relationship.

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Nancy might want to disconnect,

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but then she'd be worried,

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what if I'm missing something important?

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So design can fix this problem.

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Let's say you have Nancy again on the left,

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John on the right,

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and John remembers,

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I need to send Nancy that document,

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except this time,

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Nancy can mark that she's focused.

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Let's say she drags a slider