A recent study followed a group of young adults and a group of older adults who wore biometric belts with embedded eyeglass cameras for more than 300 hours of leisure time.14 While the younger adults switched from task to task twenty-seven times per hour—once every two minutes—the older adults were not all that great at maintaining their attention either, switching tasks seventeen times per hour, or once every three to four minutes. Former Microsoft executive Linda Stone dubbed this constant multitasking “continuous partial attention.”15 As we will discuss later in this book, frequent task
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