Quotes from Jeff Davidson

Because major web sites invite anonymous visitor commentary and virtually never monitor it, they contort all of society: Pandora's global box has been opened and everyone has an opinion, no matter how under-informed they might be.

Considering all that competes for your time and attention, if you don't actively take steps to simplify your life and carve out what I call "breathing space," you will most certainly find yourself in a perpetual state of overwhelm.

Every single day on earth, as it's been for millions of years, the sun slowly rises in the east, night gives way to dawn, dawn gives way to morning, the sun bursts above the horizon a little bit at a time and then all of a sudden in full bloom. The sky becomes lighter and clearer, the earth becomes radiated with light, and another day has begun.

How many times in the last year have you gotten up before the sun makes its way over that distant eastern horizon and witnessed the actual dawning of a new day? It is illuminating. It is inspiring. It is breathtaking.

No one chooses to be overwhelmed, but they sure as heck allow it to happen.

Regardless of what occurs on earth, what goes well, what doesn't go well, and all the things that challenge humanity and challenge us personally, the sun continues to rise every morning.

We will flush greed out of our system or be flushed away by it.

I would be utterly emabarrassed to have others around me hear my half of what can only be described as pedestrian. "Yes, the elevator has just pulled up to the 16th floor." Do these people have the ability to go, for say, an eight- or ten-minute stretch without being in contact with someone else? What are they afraid of? Confronting their own thoughts?

Computers thwart, contort, and befuddle us. We mess around with fonts, change screen backgrounds, slow down or increase mouse speed. We tweak and we piddle. We spend countless hours preparing PowerPoint slides that most people forget in seconds. We generate reports in duplicate and triplicate and then somw that end up serving only one function for most of the recipients - to collect dust.

It's not that you can't get things done with the use of a cell phone; indeed you can get a lot of things done. However, the nature of what you get done is highly skewed. Just as the man with only a hammer sees everything as nails, the incessant cell phone user accomplishes a variety of tasks, understandably enough, that accrue directly to having a cell phone.

A study at Cornell University found that low-level noise both lowered job motivation and increased stress levels. It appears as well that an open-office type of environment can contribute to musculoskeletal problems such as a stiff back or tense neck and even heart disease due to increased levels of epinephrine, a stress hormone.

By some estimates, the data-storage curve is rocketing upward at the rate of 800 percent per year. Organizations are collecting so much data they're overwhelmed. Families are no different; we have more things on disk, more photos, more items stored than we'll ever have to allocate time for. "Since Kodachrome made way for jpeg, pictures accumulate on hard drives like wet leaves in a gutter." (Jim Lewis, author of "The King is Dead")

When your brain is always engaged, when your neurons are always firing, when you find yourself in a continual mode of reacting and responding, instead of steering and directing, the best and brightest solutions that you are capable of producing rarely see the light of day.

Soetsu Yanagi, in the "Unknown Craftsman", writes, "Man is most free when his tools are proportionate to his needs." For example, for optimal productivity, a carpenter needs woodworking tools and an environment conducive to his work, not a steam shovel or army tank.

Once taken off one task without completing the transaction, the mind continues to seek closure. Fight to stay focused on the task at hand.

The results are in and the cell phone has become the most isruptive aspect of work and everyday life. With more than four fifths of the population sporting these little gadgets, it's now taken as a given that any part of your day is subject to disruption.

Over-communication at work can create a new level of tasks and responsibilities.

Complexity is a universal norm, while simplicity in your life is an achievable exception.

Abundance is the natural state of the Earth, of nature, and of the universe.

Each of us was born in an era when complexity has become the hallmark of our existence.

With each passing second, more information becomes newly available than you could ingest, at typical viewing and reading speed, in the next eighty years.

No previous generation on earth has had more competing demands for its time and attention than this one.

In his entire life, George Washington never spent a second watching CNN Headline News or making a Facebook post, and he had no Twitter followers!

The infrastructure that holds society in place is based on increasingly sophisticated systems, technology, and complexity.