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Lachlan Brown
Writer at Silicon Canals

Lachlan Brown

Co-Publisher

Lachlan Brown is a writer at Silicon Canals contributing across the Mind pillar. His background blends formal training — a Graduate Diploma in Psychological Studies from Deakin University — with a long practice of Eastern philosophy and two decades of operating businesses from scratch. He writes about high-performance routines, decision-making under pressure, and the discipline of clarity in technology work — where the patterns that govern building also govern living. He splits his time between Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City.

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Mind

When work is interrupted, researchers found it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds before people return to the original task. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s workplace data shows its heaviest-connected workers can receive 275 meetings, emails and chat pings a day — suggesting chronic distraction isn’t just a focus problem, but a problem built into how modern work is organized.

The 23-minute return time and Microsoft's 275 daily pings measure different things, but together they reveal how workplace systems can turn sustained attention into an organisational privilege.

Mind

A 2026 analysis of more than 215,000 moves by professional chess players found something deeply counterintuitive: faster decisions were consistently associated with better moves, even after researchers accounted for position complexity and time pressure — suggesting that among experts, hesitation can sometimes signal uncertainty rather than deeper thinking.

Professional chess players often made their strongest moves fastest. The study suggests hesitation can reveal uncertainty, but it does not show that forcing people to rush improves judgement.