Pay attention! Isn’t that the first step to. . . well. . . just about everything? It turns out, however, that most of us are terrible judges of how well we can focus. We tend to think that we can handle more stimulation than we can, which explains why we overload ourselves. The solution, says Michelle D. Miller in this outstanding new book about how technology can support learning, is be aware of how harmful it is to divide our attention. Believing that we can handle multiple simultaneous demands and distractions can prevent us from achieving our goals.
Michelle D. Miller, Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 67.