Quotes About Attention

le distrazioni digitali di bassa qualità rivestono un ruolo importante nella vita delle persone, più di quanto queste immaginino

Attention residue left by unresolved switches dampens your performance.

I propose an alternative to the Internet Sabbath. Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction

To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the "mental wrecks" in Nass's research, it's not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

To summarize, 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.

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. When Grant is working for days in isolation on a paper, in other words, he's doing so at a higher level of effectiveness than the standard professor following a more distracted strategy in which the work is repeatedly interrupted by residue-slathering interruptions.

the Slow Media Manifesto argues that in an age in which the digital attention economy is shoveling more and more clickbait toward us and fragmenting our focus into emotionally charged shards, the right response is to become more mindful in our media consumption:

The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don't simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction

People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they're pretty much mental wrecks.

If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the "mental wrecks" in Nass's research, it's not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

Notice, this minimalist philosophy contrasts starkly with the maximalist philosophy that most people deploy by default—a mind-set in which any potential for benefit is enough to start using a technology that catches your attention. A maximalist is very uncomfortable with the idea that anyone might miss out on something that's the least bit interesting or valuable.

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

The alternative, to not embrace all things Internet, is, as Postman would say, "invisible and therefore irrelevant.

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.

resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.

network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.

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.

The ability in question is called "attentional control," and it measures the subjects' ability to maintain their focus on essential information.

forcing you to resist distraction and return your attention repeatedly to a well-defined problem, it helps strengthen your distraction-resisting muscles,

This study, it turns out, is one of many that validate attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.

I decided that focusing my attention on a bottom-up understanding of my own field's most difficult results would be a good first step toward revitalizing my career capital stores. To

You must be on your guard for looping, as it can quickly subvert an entire productive meditation session. When you notice it, remark to yourself that you seem to be in a loop, then redirect your attention toward the next step.

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.