It's Friday, and it's not your imagination: birds of a selfish feather really do flock together; Shopify wields a new mallet in their ongoing meeting whack-a-mole; and yep, your ability to focus has gone to pot, but if you can make it to the end of this sentence, there's still hope for you.

THERE’S A ME IN TEAM

Psychologists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign find that your colleagues are less interested in fitting in than they are in finding people a lot like themselves.

“People really like others who are similar to themselves—to a shocking degree,” one of the researchers explains.

One takeaway? A selfish colleague is likely to reward another selfish colleague--even if it's not personally beneficial. If you're already selfish, you don't mind someone else sucking the oxygen from a meeting because it validates your own self-absorbed instincts. Moving this from merely "huh, interesting" territory to downtown Bummertown is the finding that not only does selfish behavior beget selfish behavior, selfish people actually tend to punish those who are more generous. Womp womp.

—Fast Company, 3m

TIME IS (SOMEONE ELSE’S) MONEY

The average employee sits in 17.7 meetings a week, spending a third to a whole half of their work life in a Zoom call or conference room. The figure is even higher for executives. In an attempt to swim against this tide, Shopify is attaching a visible price tag to employees' calendar events.

Sarah Green Carmichael at Bloomberg argues this attempt is worth the awkwardness of reminding employees how much their bosses make. “A typical 30-minute endeavor with three employees can run from $700 up to $1,600” depending on role and seniority, report ... Bloomberg colleagues Mia Gindis and Matthew Boyle, and adding an executive can send the cost soaring over $2,000."

Why would a meeting cost the same as a first-class ticket to the Virgin Islands? As it turns out, meetings aren't a terribly efficient way to get things done. Many of us know this in our bones: meetings often reduce collaboration as people zone out or multi-task in order to get their actual work done (or schedule more meetings).

Carmichael suggests that 1-2 meeting days per week is the sweet spot that allows for focused work outside of the conference room while preserving the genuine utility of some meetings. We don't know yet if meeting price tags will get Shopify closer to that goal, or if it’ll start an arms race of who has the most expensive meeting.

—Washington Post, 6m

MONKEY MONKEY UNDERPANTS

You know it and I know it, but neither of us wants to hear it: you can regain your focus by ignoring your phone.

It turns out you're wasting more time than Screentime lets on. Each time you travel between your phone and your work and back again, you make a mini cognitive commute. And your brain seems to like that trolley ride (ding!) a lot. Like, a lot a lot:

"In the early 2000s, Gloria Marks and her team at the University of California, Irvine tracked people while they used an electronic device and noted each time their focus shifted to something new—roughly every 2.5 minutes, on average. In recent repeats of that experiment, she says, the average has gone down to about 47 seconds."

47 seconds!

The good news here is that we haven’t necessarily lost the ability to focus. Our brains aren't being rewired, says Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, director of the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, but it is true that our devices are designed to "[leverage] how our brains operate to keep us engaged with our electronics."

Want better focus? Research demonstrates that over time, you can create new habits that are reinforced by muscle memory. You can train yourself to ignore the ding -- and let that trolley pass on by.

—Time, 4m

ELSEWHERE ON THE INTERNETS

• The solution to better software development … Unix! (Bell Labs archives, YouTube)

• The ‘Eleanor Rigby’ of video game music (IGN Nordic)

• The history of the paper airplane (Popular Mechanics)

• Chrome extension for monitoring Chrome extensions (GitHub)

• Play wipEout in your browser (Phoboslab)

YESTERYEAR TECH OF THE WEEK

Oh no, it looks like you might be having trouble with your IBM Personal System/2 Model 50. Luckily, this diagnostics manual is readily available at your local online auction website:

Until next week 🫡,

— 💬 The EiT Crew at Status Hero