Latest news with #DanielLevitin
Forbes
18-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Focus As A Leadership Skill: The Pros And Cons Of Multitasking At Work
Focus As A Leadership Skill: The Pros And Cons Of Multitasking At Work In today's always-on workplace, one of the most overlooked leadership skills is focus. With attention spans shrinking and expectations growing, many leaders are being pulled in too many directions at once. According to a 2022 study from the University of California, Irvine, the average worker switches tasks every three minutes, and it can take up to 23 minutes to fully regain focus after each interruption. This environment encourages constant context switching and multitasking, often at the expense of deep work and strategic thinking. But, is multitasking always a bad thing? Multitasking gets a bad reputation. It is frequently blamed for everything from poor memory to low-quality output. But in many workplaces, multitasking is not only expected, it is rewarded. And in some cases, it works. I know this firsthand. When I worked as an account executive for a bank, I was expected to make a high volume of sales calls every day. The company measured not just the number of calls, but how long I spent on the phone. I found that if I typed my notes as I spoke with each customer, I could both document details in real time and hit my call time targets. Some might call it attention switching. I thought of it as practical multitasking. And it helped me win awards. Research shows that this type of multitasking, typing while talking, is more accurately described as dual-task processing. Because note-taking was a highly practiced skill, it did not take my attention away from the real-time conversation. It allowed me to reinforce memory and avoid duplicating effort. This highlights a valuable distinction: not all multitasking is created equal. Why Multitasking At Work Has A Bad Reputation Multitasking has been criticized by neuroscientists and productivity experts for years. Studies have shown that switching between tasks can lead to cognitive overload, reduced efficiency, and more mistakes. Dr. Daniel Levitin, author of The Organized Mind, has explained that task switching burns through the brain's glucose-based energy supply and causes mental fatigue. This kind of multitasking, trying to juggle multiple unrelated tasks simultaneously, can decrease productivity by up to 40%, according to research cited by the American Psychological Association. But not all multitasking is the same. Context matters. So does the nature of the task and the individual's mental framework. Some types of multitasking are more about flow and integration, while others are more disruptive. When Multitasking Works: Routine Tasks And Cognitive Pairing In some situations, multitasking can actually improve efficiency. Dr. Friederike Fabritius, a neuroscientist and author I interviewed, emphasized the importance of understanding how the brain processes information. She explained that pairing a routine task with a cognitive one can help manage energy and attention. For example, listening to a podcast while organizing files or walking during a meeting can enhance mental engagement. This aligns with what some call 'background multitasking,' where a low-effort, low-focus task runs alongside a more demanding one. These combinations allow people to use their time more strategically without overloading their brain. The Cost Of Poorly Managed Multitasking In Leadership The real danger of multitasking shows up when leaders take on too many high-focus tasks at once. It dilutes presence and weakens judgment. Dr. Frances Frei, a Harvard Business School professor I interviewed, noted that trust in leadership begins with presence. If a leader appears distracted, employees often interpret that as disinterest or dismissal, even if the leader believes they are being efficient. When multitasking prevents leaders from being fully engaged in conversations, problem solving, or decision making, the result is a disconnect. It affects not only outcomes but relationships. Multitasking, Attention Switching, And Energy Drain At Work The difference between multitasking and attention switching is subtle but important. Dr. Daniel Z. Lieberman, a psychiatrist and author of The Molecule of More, explained when I interviewed him how dopamine drives our desire for novelty. The brain enjoys the thrill of switching tasks, but it comes at a cost. Every switch uses up cognitive resources. This is why people often feel exhausted after a day filled with interruptions, even if the total workload was manageable. It is not just the number of tasks, but how fragmented the experience felt. What Leaders Can Do To Set Better Boundaries Around Multitasking And Focus Leaders set the tone for how focus is valued, or devalued, on their teams. If leaders are constantly checking their phones in meetings, responding to emails mid-conversation, or accepting every calendar invite, they model distraction. When I interviewed Stephen White, Chief Operating Officer of Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas, he emphasized that creating space for focus is one of the most undervalued habits in leadership. He recommended leaders 'create clarity by protecting time for thinking, not just doing.' That includes carving out meeting-free hours, encouraging asynchronous communication when possible, and reinforcing that deep work matters. Multitasking Vs. Being Efficient: How To Know The Difference Being able to juggle multiple responsibilities is often seen as a strength. But there is a difference between being adaptable and being scattered. When leaders try to solve every problem at once or jump from meeting to meeting without reflection, they are more likely to react than respond. To assess whether multitasking is helping or hurting, leaders can ask: How To Lead With Focus In A Multitasking Environment Modern workplaces are not designed for singular focus. Between Slack notifications, back-to-back meetings, and digital overload, leaders must learn to manage, not eliminate, multitasking. Dr. Adam Alter, who I interviewed about technology addiction, emphasized that managing digital distractions requires intention. He recommended creating tech boundaries, like setting specific times to check email and disabling nonessential notifications. These micro-adjustments protect attention and reduce the cognitive tax of constant switching. Leaders can improve by: The Leadership Advantage Of Strategic Multitasking The reality is, some multitasking is inevitable. Leaders wear many hats and juggle competing priorities. The key is to approach multitasking strategically, not reflexively. Knowing when it adds value and when it diminishes it is essential. By embracing intentional multitasking, where compatible tasks are paired with purpose, leaders can boost efficiency without losing clarity. But when every ping, task, and conversation is treated as equal, leadership becomes reactive. The best leaders know how to toggle between modes: when to integrate, when to sequence, and when to stop everything and focus. Multitasking And Focus Are Both Essential When Used Intentionally Multitasking is part of modern leadership, but it should be a conscious choice, not a knee-jerk reflex. When leaders understand how their attention works, they can use it more effectively, without sacrificing quality or connection. Some multitasking can support productivity, especially when it involves pairing practiced habits with active thinking. But it must have boundaries. The best leaders know when to slow down, give something their full attention, and guide their teams with intention.
The Guardian
14-04-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Music can lift mood, foster community and even rewire brains – but does it need to have a purpose?
Growing up, I never questioned the intrinsic value of classical music. My father practising classical and jazz guitar was the aural wallpaper to my childhood, and at my rural state school I took lessons on the recorder, the violin, the cello, the trombone, the piano. The after-school clubs on offer included, somewhat implausibly, an ocarina ensemble. Music was art, and wasn't art the point of it all, when you got right down to it? The reason to live, after we cater for all our basic needs? It was certainly what led me to become first a classical musician, and then a music historian. But when my dad died unexpectedly in 2019, it threw my relationship with music into sharp relief. All of a sudden, I couldn't bear listening to it. It was too painful, or it grated on my nerves and made me angry. I started to question how and why music mattered to me. And, as I learned to care about it again, I started to wonder about the ways in which music might care for me in return. I'm not the only one to have been thinking about this lately. The capacity of music to influence wellbeing and healing is having a cultural moment. Amid a flurry of new books – Hark: How Women Listen by Alice Vincent, Daniel Levitin's Music as Medicine: How We Can Harness Its Therapeutic Power; soprano Renée Fleming's Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness – the issues have been focused by the debate around the BBC's new station, Radio 3 Unwind, which aims to mobilise (mostly) classical music to 'enhance wellbeing'. The music it plays is designed to relax us; the station is promoted using wellness-inspired language, promising to 'help you escape the pressures of modern life'. Programming on Unwind is light on chat, but heavy on second (ie slow) movements and, er, birdsong. The schedule consists mostly of playlist-type shows with names such as Mindful Mix and Classical Wind Down and features plenty of recognisable choral, piano and instrumental classics from big hitters such as Chopin, Purcell and Mozart, alongside an emphasis on new music and composers from diverse backgrounds. Unwind's presenters often have psychology or mindfulness credentials – and above all soothing voices. When I tune in, I find myself being encouraged to consider 'the grandness of the natural world' by an authoritative baritone against strains of undulating woodwind, majestic strings, sonorous horns. 'You breathe, as nature would have you breathe. You are alive.' Hmmm. A Shostakovich symphony this is not. I can't quite shake the feeling that I'm settling in for a spa treatment. Mind you, I have a lot of time for mindfulness or also for spas. And I have the most time of all for any initiative that might get people who don't already listen to a particular type of music to give it a try. Gateway drugs are important – especially for classical music, because in the UK it's managed to get an unwarrantedly fusty reputation. And hey, listening to Unwind is nice. Doing breathing exercises is nice. It is relaxing. But lots of things are relaxing. Baths, for instance. Aromatherapy candles. Isn't music different? The anxiety is that Unwind devalues music, so that we start thinking that it is only of value insofar as it's useful for something else. Mightn't Unwind encourage listeners to think classical music is little more than bland background muzak, with nothing to say? Criticism has come from all directions: the BBC has been accused of selling out, of dumbing down, of anaesthetising listeners and of relegating classical music to the awful category of 'ambient'. There's been a rallying cry for the intrinsic value of music, music for music's sake. This debate is nothing new. People have long castigated the soporific properties of certain music. For some it's been political: German playwright Bertolt Brecht complained that Wagnerian Romanticism stupefied listeners, dulling their critical faculties and their revolutionary fervour. And there's a noble history of people advocating for the intrinsic value of music. Enter bespectacled misanthrope Theodor Adorno, for instance, the critical theorist who took the discussion to extremes in the mid-20th century, arguing that popular music was irredeemably compromised by being, well, popular. True music for Adorno, a knotty composer himself, turned its back on the market. The problem was that Adorno's 'true music' – the eye-watering dissonances of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern – wasn't always especially easy to listen to. I'm inclined to agree with Adorno on at least some of this. I am allergic to the suggestion that music needs to be attached to claims about something else to be worthwhile – be that its ability to make money, or aid focus (and productivity), or to optimise health. Can't it just be for its own sake? But then what do we do with the fact that listening to and playing music does seem to be good for your health? Take musician and broadcaster Clemency Burton-Hill's moving BBC documentary My Brain: After the Rupture, which explores her recovery from a catastrophic bleed on one side of her brain in early 2020, completely knocking out her speech centres. Neurologists believe musical training increases the chance of having language distributed over both sides of the brain, and that this probably accelerated her ability to recover speech. That may be a dramatic example, but Daniel Levitin argues compellingly in Music as Medicine for the therapeutic benefits of music: among other things, for Parkinson's disease, dementia and pain perception. He notes the role of music in shamanic healing rituals; these properties of music have long been recognised by human cultures. We all already self-medicate with music. 'Most people know what music to reach for when they want to maintain or alter their mood state.' For Levitin, however, music isn't separate to us, a thing that can be used to optimise health. It is demonstrably deeply entangled throughout the brain, and embedded in our most fundamental human processes, across all forms of attention. 'Music lives inside each of us who listen,' he writes. Alice Vincent, a former pop music journalist, whose book tells the story of her return to music after the critical illness of her infant son, believes music's potency comes from how it makes people feel seen and understood. 'Ultimately, that's the most basic form of therapy you could ask for,' she tells me. After spending her 20s fitting herself into the male-dominated coolness hierarchies of music journalism, Vincent's return to music came through reimagining it as something much bigger: resonance, reverberation, communality. 'I now get a lot of joy from singing nursery rhymes with a bunch of women and their small children in a community library. From a classic pop patriarchal standpoint, that is not a cool way of making music, but there's still a community and a resonance. There's an identity with it that feels really powerful.' When I came back to music after my father's death, I found the joy was in creative play. Messing around, exploring, bashing something out on the piano, the satisfaction of small improvements. I was lucky that my gateway drug to classical music was music lessons in school; for others, it might be thinking: 'I'm stressed … help!' Where the art-for-art's-sakers and the music-for-healing camps find common ground is in the idea that as a society we've lost sight of how important music is. Over the past decade, there's been a sharp decline in UK sixth-formers studying the arts, following the government's 'strategic priority' emphasising Stem subjects. But music is not the icing on the cake of an existence dominated by science, technology and economics; it's (to push a metaphor too far) the rich butter whipped right through the mix. We are aural creatures, reverberating together. Emily MacGregor is the author of While the Music Lasts: A Memoir of Music, Grief and Joy.
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Savannah Book Festival: author Dr. Daniel J. Levitin
SAVANNAH, Ga. (WSAV) — Music can uplift and heal. But music is also very subjective. What you like is not necessarily what others like. Why is this? Dr. Daniel Levitin, a renowned cognitive psychiatrist, has written a book, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord, exploring the curative powers of music, showing us how and why it is one of the most potent therapies today. He brings together, for the first time, the results of numerous studies on music and the brain, demonstrating how music can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, to cognitive injury, depression, and pain. And he will be at the 2025 Savannah Book Festival to discuss his findings. So to begin with, why do we like some music and not other kinds? Dr. Levitin says it's not that cut and dried. 'There's not good music and bad music. There's music I like and music I don't care for. And maybe someday I'll care for it. Maybe I never will. But I retain an open mind. Musical preferences is an area of active research in my field. Why do people like the music they like? And it's complicated.' Complicated because there are so many factors. 'There are genetic instructions for things like a propensity to be open-minded and curious that will go a long way in terms of musical taste. Some people are genetically predisposed to say, 'I don't want to hear that.' Others will say, 'Wow, that's new and shiny and interesting. Let me explore that.' Dr. Levitin says environment also plays a part in musical preference. 'Whether you're rebelling, or a conformist, we tend to listen to music that our friends are listening to or what the people we care about are listening to.' As a scientist, Dr. Levitin is very qualified to discuss the many ways music impacts our lives. But he is also a talented musician himself. He plays piano, clarinet, saxophone, and guitar. He also writes music and songs. He has worked with some of the biggest music acts, producing and engineering their work. When asked who he listens to, he said, 'Well, you know, most of my friends are songwriters, and so I get a constant stream of stuff they're working on. A lot of it [hasn't been] released yet.' Levitan is always on the hunt for something new too. 'It goes back to my days in the eighties when I was a talent scout for Columbia Records, and I would get mail bins full of stuff every day that nobody had ever heard. And I still listen to some of it.' Levitin is excited to come to the Savannah Book Festival for the first time to promote his latest book. 'I'm looking forward to presenting the book to this esteemed and celebrated festival.' His session will feature something different than others: he'll be joined on stage by Howard Paul, president and CEO of Benedetto Guitars, the premier jazz guitars made right here in Savannah. They've known each other for years. Paul will play one of his favorite Benedettos during Levitin's session as an example of how music impacts us. Levitin is also participating in the Festival's 'SBF@Schools' program, where authors go into local schools. They discuss their writing process and answer questions from students. He's scheduled to participate in an American Literature class at Herschel V. Jenkins High School the day before Free Festival Saturday. 'With any scientist in any field, when we find something that doesn't make sense, we love that. It means there's some knowledge in the canon that's missing.' Levitin's I Heard There Was a Secret Chord brings together dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and a love of all things music. For more on Dr. Daniel Levitin's Savannah Book Festival appearance, go to Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
