Quotes About Distraction

James thinks we are all living through something like a denial-of-service attack on our minds. "We're that server, and there's all these things trying to grab our attention by throwing information at us…. It undermines our capacity for responding to anything. It leaves us in a state of either distraction, or paralysis.

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 a lot.

wondered if in some ways we are increasingly speed-reading life, skimming hurriedly from one thing to another, absorbing less and less.

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.

different study of office workers in the U.S. found most of them never get an hour of uninterrupted work in a typical day. If this goes on for months and years, it scrambles your ability to figure out who you are and what you want. You become lost in your own

People were, [Tristan Harris] warned, living 'on a treadmill of continuous checking.

A study by Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you are focusing on something and you get interrupted, on average it will take twenty-three minutes for you to get back to the same state of focus. A different study of office workers in the U.S. found most of them never get an hour of uninterrupted work in a typical day. If this goes on for months and years, it scrambles your ability to figure out who you are and what you want. You become lost in your own life.

Reading books trains us to read in a particular way—in a linear fashion, focused on one thing for a sustained period. Reading from screens, she has discovered, trains us to read in a different way—in a manic skip and jump from one thing to another.

brain moment to moment, task to task—[and] that comes with a cost.

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.

We can't live like this!" I said. "You don't know how to be present! You are missing your life! You're afraid of missing out—that's why you are checking your screen all the time! By doing that, you are guaranteeing you are missing out! You are missing your one and only life! You can't see the things that are right in front of you, the things you have been longing to see since you were a little boy! None of these people can! Look at them!

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

I realized that the collapse in reading books is in some ways a symptom of our atrophying attention, and in some ways a cause of it. It's a spiral – as we began to move from books to screens, we started to lose some of the capacity for the deeper reading that comes from books, and that in turn, made us less likely to read books.

you feel the urge to check your phone, wait ten minutes. He says you should "time-box"—which means you should draw up a detailed schedule of what you are going to do each day,

If you have a great work in your head, nothing else thrives near it; all other thoughts are repelled, and the pleasure of life itself is for the time lost.

I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head.

I am never five minutes into stripping the clutter from my life before I start running into the clutter that is my life.

Don't text or twitter during the show. Just live your life. Don't keep telling people what you're doing. Just, because also - also - it lights up your big dumb face.

The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.

I do have ADD and in real life, I'm all over the place and can hardly focus. If we were talking for, for more than an hour or so, I'd start drifting off... I can't sit still too long.

I think a lot of times we can get distracted and not be in the moment with people and be missing all the life happening in the moment.

I have so many things going on in my life that my mind is always in other places.

I think people watch TV to escape from life.

How was I supposed to concentrate on my mental health when my therapist was encased in orange sparkle madness?