I was talking to my co-author* Farhan about the Pomodoro technique, and he mentioned that while at UCSF Adam Gazzaley told him that during crunch time he physically disconnect the internet (like, unplug the Ethernet cable) and turn off his phone. And he should know: his research is focused on top-down attention and cognitive aging, clearly relevant to the issue of focus and multitasking. He has a TEDx talk, which is a good layman’s intro to the subject (above). The lab seems to be cranking out high impact paper after paper.

Edit: Here’s a great blog post summarizing some research on the subject.

Sidenote: Bradley Voytek is a post-doc in Adam’s lab. His blog is fantastic. His joke SFN 2012 poster about Robocop was hilarious (below).

*and sometime wingman