Our Brains and the Immediate

Another reminder for me to avoid the "tyranny of the urgent" (if you'll pardon the evolutionary biology):

We are easily distracted also because we vastly overvalue what happens to us right now compared with what comes in the future and because novelty is intrinsically rewarding. So whatever we are supposed to be focusing on has to compete with every new email, new task, new blog post and new conversation that wanders into our information sphere. These biases may have served us well in our species' evolutionary past, when the future was uncertain and the new could well be a threat that deserved immediate attention. But nowadays the new is more often trivial than essential, and sacrificing immediate rewards can yield greater ones in the future.

(from a WSJ book review entitled "You Have Too Much Mail" by Christopher Chabris, of the book, The Overflowing Brain, Torkel Klingberg)