Quotes About Distraction

In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.

Both intuition and a growing body of research underscore the reality that sharing a workspace with a large number of coworkers is incredibly distracting—creating an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously. In a 2013 article summarizing recent research on this topic, Bloomberg Businessweek went so far as to call for an end to the "tyranny of the open-plan office." And yet, these open office designs are not embraced haphazardly.

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

Finally, as detailed in the first part of these book, many of these tools are engineered to hijack our social instincts to create an addictive allure. When you spend multiple hours a day compulsively clicking & swiping, there's much less free time left for slower interactions. And because this compulsive use emits a patina of socialness, it can delude you into thinking that you're already serving your relationships well, making further action unnecessary.

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.

interruption, even if short, delays the total time required to complete a task by a significant fraction.

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.

Depth-destroying behaviors such as immediate e-mail responses and an active social media presence are lauded, while avoidance of these trends generates suspicion.

For example, you might institute a ban on any Internet use,

Another issue muddying the connection between depth and meaning in knowledge work is the cacophony of voices attempting to convince knowledge workers to spend more time engaged in shallow activities.

manifesto titled "A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users' Attention.

without these accountability tools, I tended to procrastinate on this work, turning my attention to more urgent but less important matters.

Declaring freedom from your smartphone is probably the most serious step you can take toward embracing the attention resistance. This follows because smartphones are the preferred Trojan horse of the digital attention economy.

extracting value from information is an activity that's often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.

It's instead quite natural once you recognize that the power of a general-purpose computer is in the total number of things it enables the user to do, not the total number of things it enables the user to do simultaneously.

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate

the lack of distraction in my life tones down that background hum of nervous mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade people's daily lives.

although our current embrace of distraction is a real phenomenon, it's built on an unstable foundation and can be easily dismissed once you decide

In my experience, this analysis is spot-on. If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you'll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.

Most knowledge workers avoid the uncomfortable strain of deliberate practice like the plague, a reality emphasized by the typical cubicle dweller's obsessive e-mail–checking habit—for what is this behavior if not an escape from work that's more mentally demanding? As

conversation is what counts—don't be distracted from this reality by the shiny stuff on your screen.

deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction,

Sosyal medya üzerinde çal??an ve dersler veren bir akademisyenin sözlerini al?nt?layacak olursam: Bu kadar çok insanla irtibat halinde olmam?za gerek yok.

toward distracting behavior, because in an Internet-centric technopoly such behavior is not up for discussion.