Quotes About Distraction

Don't let the things of the world distract you. Focus on your purpose

What did people do prior to cell phones? Read a book? If I'm stuck in a car, and I don't have my phone, I'm like, 'What am I doing?' Car rides used to be one of my favorite things.

I've been lucky enough to be too busy for TV because if I'm not, I'll get stuck in front of it.

But I will add, there's one thing I will not do, ever: I will never talk to you about things you cannot change. It plants a negativity in the head of a designer or the student, and it's a distraction.

I was 16 and did a play at school. I was a rather good student... And then I did a play when I was 16 and completely lost all my concentration for academics.

I was a terrible athlete and a pretty bad student. I couldn't focus. My imagination was always racing.

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.

For an artiste like me, it was very difficult to focus on studies with a beautiful campus around me.

I shout at the radio when someone starts talking over the end of a song. Shut up! I don't want to hear that the DJ has just found a mouldy sandwich in the corner of the studio. Nor do I like it when the magic of something you're watching is shattered by an advert for Argos.

Football has changed, and so has the relationship between the players on the pitch. Where once some players would try everything to distract opponents, now it's harder. There are TV cameras everywhere, which have much higher quality images than before. There are lip readers in studios working out what you are saying to each other.

If you're studying from a book and trying to listen in on a conversation at the same time, those are two separate projects, each started and maintained by distinct circuits in the brain. Pay more attention to one for a moment and you're automatically paying less attention to the other.

I spent most of my time playing pool instead of studying.

It is so easy now to never get bored because we have our phones with us all the time and we are always looking at stuff. I think when we get bored we are the most creative.

PowerPoint makes us stupid.

I think it would be stupid for us to try and tell people who are dancing in a discotheque about the problems of the world. That is the very thing they have come away to avoid.

Work takes different forms. I can spend two or three days without completing anything, and it's choppy: it's filled with all kinds of irrationalities and stupid actions. I have some notion, and then I drop it because something else comes along. I'm forever darting from one side of the room to the other.

We live in a time where there's a great deal of navel-gazing with the devices that we have that occupy so much of our time... many subjects of history are lost.

It's very easy to get caught up in everything that's going on and just daily stuff being a distraction. When you have all that taken away from you, your daily activity becomes a lot more subtle, and you appreciate it all a lot more.

When you're directed by social media, I think it's very easy to lose a sense of agency. And you can see it when you go to any subway station, you walk down any street in a city, you will see 70-80 percent of people staring into their phones as they walk or stand.

I can't emphasize this idea enough. Getting involved with your collaborator's problems almost always distracts you from your own. That can be tempting. That can be a relief. But it usually leads to disaster.

People spend hours constantly checking and tweeting and Facebooking. And it's cool to check up on your friends and see what's going on in the world, but it's not cool to spend five hours of your day on the computer looking at the Internet.

The secret of patience is doing something else in the meanwhile

Let not the sands of time get in your lunch.

I haven't thought about her for nearly twenty minutes. With a bit of practice, I might make it to thirty.