Quotes About Distraction

Fear was sometimes useful, but when the thing that you feared was present in everything around you and prevented you from dealing with your situation practically, it became a pointless distraction

Fear was debilitating, and she hated it — the thudding heart, the endless, breathless tension. She recalled what Major Thakur had said, that those who feared most often failed on the climb, or died. Fear was sometimes useful, but when the thing you feared was present in everything around you, and prevented you from dealing with your situation practically, it became a pointless distraction.

While we are aiming at clear ideas, the food gets cold and tasteless.

Tristan [Harris] believes that what we are seeing is 'the collective downgrading of humans and the upgrading of machines'. We are becoming less rational, less intelligent, less focused.

The average office worker now spends 40 percent of their work time wrongly believing they are "multitasking"--which means they are incurring all these costs for their attention and focus. In fact, uninterrupted time is becoming rare. One study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day.

The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world's attention burns.

The algorithm they actually use varies all the time, but it has one key driving principle that is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen.

Tristan taught me that the phones we have, and the programs that run on them, were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world to maximally grab and maximally hold our attention

So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you'll make more mistakes, you'll be less creative, and you'll remember less of what you do.

In general, we want to take the easy way out, but what makes us happy is doing the thing that's a little bit difficult. What's happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that's with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.

The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention—to focus—was cracking and breaking.

The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.

if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions. I kept looking at things and imagining how I would describe them in a tweet, and then imagining what people would say in response.

I wondered if the motto for our era should be: I tried to live, but I got distracted.

A different study by Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine—who I interviewed—observed how long on average an adult working in an office stays on one task. It was three minutes.

In our normal lives, many of us try to seek relief from distraction simply by crashing—we try to recover from a day of overload by collapsing in front of the TV. But if you only break away from distraction into rest—if you don't replace it with a positive goal you are striving toward—you will always be pulled back to distraction sooner or later. The more powerful path out of distraction is to find your flow.

I like the person I become when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I spend a lot of time on social media.

It's not your fault you can't focus. It's by design. Your distraction is their fuel.

She explained to me that if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions. I kept looking at things and imagining how I would describe them in a tweet, and then imagining what people would say in response.

The study found that "technological distraction"—just getting emails and calls—caused a drop in the workers' IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that's twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you'd be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages

Their business model," he says, "is screen time, not life time.

by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.

they are degrading the quality of our thinking. Without mind-wandering, we find it harder to make sense of the world—and in the jammed-up state of confusion that creates, we become even more vulnerable to the next source of distraction that comes along.

better techniques being discovered every week. One day, when we were walking in San Francisco, Tristan said to me: "Things look pretty bad from the outside, but when you're on the inside, things can look even worse." Tristan was starting to realize: It's not your fault you can't focus. It's by design. Your distraction is their fuel.