Jeroen Sangers

Mobile phones are a major source of distraction in our daily lives, even when we are not actively using them. Research shows that just a notification, a beep, or a vibration significantly disrupts our performance on tasks that require concentration. Remarkably, this disruption is as great as when someone is actually on a call or texting. You don’t even need to look at your phone to get distracted; that little sound or vibration is enough to lose your focus.

The reason these short notifications have such a big impact lies in what happens in our minds afterward. A notification triggers a series of thoughts unrelated to what you are doing. You start to wonder who sent a message, what’s in it, if it’s important… in short, your thoughts wander. This phenomenon, also known as ‘mind wandering’, lasts much longer than the notification itself. Even after the sound is gone, those thoughts linger in your head, and your performance continues to decline.

This explains why distraction by your phone is so persistent: it’s not just about the time spent checking your phone, but mainly about the mental interruption that lasts much longer. Our limited attention capacity must be divided over multiple things simultaneously, and when a part of it is consumed by thoughts about that notification, less is left for the task that requires our full attention.

Related:

• Attempting to do two or more attention-demanding tasks simultaneously reduces productivity
• Avoid excessive task switching to increase efficiency
• We pick up our phones over 350 times per day, almost four times more than in 2019

Finished reading: Piensa claro by Kiko Llaneras 📚

I thought interpreting data wasn’t that hard. I know the basic rule: correlation doesn’t imply causation. But Kiko Llaneras’s book has made it clear that my biases go way beyond what I thought.

The example that blew my mind: a graph showed a negative relationship between a football player’s value and their defensive actions. Until it was split by country. Suddenly, each country showed a positive relationship. The same data, two completely opposite stories depending on how you look at it. If this can happen with something as measurable as football, how many times do we misinterpret data in our daily lives without even realizing it?

If you’ve been following along, you’ve probably noticed I share updates when I start and finish reading books. It’s my way of keeping track and letting you see what’s on my reading list (you can also check my now page for the current lineup).

But here’s the thing: announcing that I finished a book isn’t particularly interesting on its own. The finish line matters less than what I found along the way.

So I’m making a small change. When I start a book, I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing: a quick note to mark the beginning. But when I finish one? I’m committing to share at least a paragraph about it. Something useful. A thought that stuck, a concept worth passing along, or why it mattered (or didn’t).

I’ve actually finished a few books recently and held off posting about them because I wanted to make this commitment first. So the next few posts you see will be those finish notifications, with a bit more substance.

Let’s see if this makes the reading updates a little more useful.

Currently reading: The 3 Alarms by Eric Partaker 📚

Currently reading: Click by Jake Knapp 📚

Finished reading: Indistractable by Nir Eyal 📚

Finished reading: Misbelief by Dan Ariely 📚

Finished reading: Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff 📚

Finished reading: Think Again by Adam Grant 📚

When I booked our flight to New York for August 12th, 2026, I was thinking about connections and arrival times and whether we’d need to sleep on the plane. What I wasn’t thinking about was the sun disappearing in the middle of the afternoon.

It hit me later, almost by accident. August 12th, 2026. That date rang a bell. And then it clicked: the solar eclipse. A once-in-a-lifetime celestial event, and we’d be somewhere over the Atlantic when it happens.

Most people would shrug and move on. You can’t see an eclipse from a plane, right? You’re too high, the windows are small, the timing never works out. But I couldn’t let it go. I had to know.

So I started digging.

Our flight takes off from Barcelona at 6:30 PM. The eclipse reaches totality around 5:50 PM in Reykjavik, Iceland. The path of totality sweeps from Reykjavik, passes under the United Kingdom and Ireland, reaching Spain by approximately 8:30 PM. We’d be airborne right in the middle of it. But being in the air at the right time isn’t enough. You need to be in the right place.

I pulled up the flight path. Barcelona to New York doesn’t go straight across; it arches northward, following the curvature of the earth, passing beneath Iceland. And the eclipse path? It follows a remarkably similar trajectory.

The pieces were falling into place.

The seat selection problem

Now comes the practical part, the detail that makes this feel real: which side of the aircraft do I need to be on?

This isn’t a question you can leave to chance. Window seats get claimed early, and if I’m on the wrong side of the plane, I’ll be watching other passengers crane their necks while I stare at clouds and ocean.

The eclipse will be to our north and east as we fly. That means I need a seat on the right side of the aircraft, looking out over the North Atlantic. I’ve already started checking seat maps.

Getting those seats won’t be easy. I suspect I’m not the only person who’s done this math. There are probably dozens of amateur astronomers and eclipse chasers on this same flight, all eyeing the same row of windows.

When plans become something more

I almost missed this entirely. It was an oversight, a detail I didn’t think to check when I clicked “confirm booking.” But now it’s become one of the things I’m most excited about.

There’s something about these unplanned moments, these cosmic coincidences that you stumble into rather than orchestrate. They remind you that the best experiences aren’t always the ones you engineer down to the last detail. Sometimes they’re the ones that find you.

We might not see it. Weather could interfere, the angle might be wrong, a thousand things could go sideways. But the possibility alone has transformed this flight from a means to an end into something worth experiencing in its own right.

Have you ever discovered something extraordinary hiding in your ordinary plans? I’d love to hear about it.