Quotes About Attention

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

this irresistible attraction to screens is leading people to feel as though they're ceding more and more of their autonomy when it comes to deciding how they direct their attention. No one, of course, signed up for this loss of control. They downloaded the apps and set up accounts for good reasons, only to discover, with grim irony, that these services were beginning to undermine the very values that made them appealing in the first place:

In such a culture, 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.

In the middle of a busy workday, or after a particularly trying morning of childcare, it's tempting to crave the release of having nothing to do—whole blocks of time with no schedule, no expectations, and no activity beyond whatever seems to catch your attention in the moment. These decompression sessions have their place, but their rewards are muted, as they tend to devolve toward low-quality activities like mindless phone swiping and half-hearted binge-watching.

If you slacked off your attention for even a moment, you could stall the entire line—forcing workers into an unnatural combination of boredom and constant attentiveness.

Every appealing headline clicked or intriguing link tabbed is another metaphorical pull of the slot machine handle.

An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you, too.

The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, . . . was all about: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?" And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.

There is a performative dimension to writing emails and cc'ing everybody, like 'Look at all the work I'm doing.' It's annoying

Twitter is crack for media addicts.

Sertillanges argues that to advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically, allowing your "converging rays of attention" to uncover the truth latent in each. In other words, he teaches: To learn requires intense concentration.

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted.

What, if anything, is active in the brain when someone is not trying to do a task? "It was an unusual question," notes Lieberman, but we should be glad they asked, because it led to a remarkable discovery: the team found that there's a particular set of regions in the brain that consistently activate when you're not attempting to do a cognitive task, and that just as consistently deactivate once you focus your attention on something specific.

to advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically, allowing your "converging rays of attention" to uncover the truth latent in each. In other words, he teaches: To learn requires intense concentration.

1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you're trying to improve or an idea you're trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it's most productive.

In a 2009 paper, titled, intriguingly, "Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?," Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking—trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously—on performance, but that in the modern knowledge work office, once you got to a high enough level, it was more common to find people working on multiple projects sequentially

Facebook'un bugün iki milyardan fazla kullan?c?s? var ve 500 milyar dolarl?k piyasa de?eriyle ABD'nin en de?erli be?inci ?irketi. Öte yandan petrol ve do?algaz ?irketi ExxonMobil'in de?eriyse yakla??k 370 milyar dolar. Anla??lan Facebook ve Google gibi ?irketlerin temel kayna?? olan insan dakikalar?n? toplamak, petrol ç?karmaktan çok daha kârl? bir i? art?k.

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.

management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.

By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task.

skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

Even worse, by seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the moment (which is almost always the case), you'll be forced to turn back to the primary task with a secondary task left unfinished. The attention residue left by such unresolved switches dampens your performance.

when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.