Quotes from Winifred Gallagher

However, by Sunday noon--not coincidentally, the unhappiest hour in America--you may have run through your options and wind up slumped on a couch, suffering from the Sabbath existential crisis. It's at just such unfocused, unproductive times, says Csikszentmihalyi, that "people start ruminating and feeling that their lives are wasted and so forth.

As the poet W. H. Auden put it, "Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

One crucial fact often gets overlooked in laments about the electronic assault on your ability to focus: your machines are not in charge of what you attend to—you are. When they prove distracting, you have only to turn them off.

stressed and/or tired to do anything more than sprawl on the couch

Sucede así, afirma, porque la «eficacia mental» absoluta surge de la combinación de diversas facultades, la más importante de las cuales no es la atención, sino «la intensidad del deseo y la pasión».

Sus pretensiones, pues, son infundadas, porque el esfuerzo realizado no nos hace más competentes, sino menos; la ejecución, en términos generales, será deficiente, propensa al error y requerirá más tiempo del que hubieran exigido las tareas por separado.

Cada puesta en marcha requiere un esfuerzo, pues tienes que volver a revisar tu memoria. La multitarea tiene un precio, y a

La capacidad de dirigir el pensamiento a voluntad te proporciona un gran poder, porque te ayuda a evitar las emociones negativas cuando aparecen».

The most dramatic example is addiction, in which the motivation to get high restricts attention to the point that the drug seems like the most important thing in the world.