Quotes About Attention

Inspiration doesn't "strike." Inspiration is scheduled. It happens when you allow it the time and attention it deserves.

Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.

The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.

Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools.

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.

Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves. They don't accept the idea that offering some small benefit is justification for allowing an attention-gobbling service into their lives, and are instead interested in applying new technology in highly selective and intentional ways that yield big wins. Just as important: they're comfortable missing out on everything else.

A side effect of memory training, in other words, is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate. This ability can then be fruitfully applied to any task demanding deep work.

If you want to win the war for attention, don't try to say 'no' to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say 'yes' to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else." For

Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

It's easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life.

The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.

First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth.

You're either remarkable or invisible," says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow.

The curmudgeons among us are vaguely uneasy about the attention people pay to their phones, and pine for the days of unhurried concentration, while the digital hipsters equate such nostalgia with Luddism and boredom, and believe that increased connection is the foundation for a utopian future.

to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn't mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it's sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention. The simple strategy proposed here of scheduling Internet blocks goes a long way toward helping you regain this attention autonomy. Work

But part of what makes social media insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marking coup: convincing our culture that if you don't use their products you might miss out.

The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment.

Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience. This

In this second part, I introduce a framework I call attention capital theory that argues for creating workflows built around processes specifically designed to help us get the most out of our human brains while minimizing unnecessary miseries. This

Once you're wired for distraction, you crave it.

she was witness to a "grand unified theory" of the mind: Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts.

we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we're now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist. Bad