Quotes About Mindfulness

For many, the core question of "is this the best way to use technology to support this value?" leads them to carefully optimize services that most people fiddle with mindlessly.

If you slacked off your attention for even a moment, you could stall the entire line—forcing workers into an unnatural combination of boredom and constant attentiveness.

give your brain the regular doses of quiet it requires to support a monumental life.

Part of what makes this philosophy so effective is that the very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools you decide to avoid.

For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life.

There's a gravity and sense of importance inherent in deep work—whether you're Ric Furrer smithing a sword or a computer programmer optimizing an algorithm. Gallagher's theory, therefore, predicts that if you spend enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance.

After embracing minimalism, Dave reduced his persistent social media use down to only a single service, Instagram, which he felt offered significant benefits to his deep interest in art. In true minimalist fashion, however, Dave didn't settle for simply deciding to "use" Instagram; he instead thought hard about how best to integrate this tool into his life. [...] making the experience of checking his feed both fast & meaningful.

The day the declutter was over, I raced back to Facebook, to my old blogs, to Discord, gleeful and ready to dive back in—and then, after about thirty minutes of aimless browsing, I kind of looked up and thought … why am I doing this? This is … boring? This isn't bringing me any kind of happiness. It took a declutter for me to notice that these technologies aren't actually adding anything to my life.

there's nothing wrong with connectivity, but if you don't balance it with regular doses of solitude, its benefits will diminish.

The title of this book, A World Without Email, turns out to be just an approachable shorthand for the more accurate portrayal of my vision: A World Without the Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow.

I want to spend time on what's important, instead of what's immediate,

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted.

philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

The goal of this book is to make the case for digital minimalism, including a more detailed exploration of what it asks and why it works, and then to teach you how to adopt this philosophy if you decide it's right for you.

management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.

Early in his visit he asked a senior monk, who had been living in a similar cabin for over fifteen years, if he ever got tired of walking the trail connecting the residences to the main building. "I'm only just starting to learn it," the monk replied mindfully.

Do what Thoreau did, which is learn to have a little disconnectedness within the connected world—don't run away.

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:

your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to,

How you'll support your work. Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth.

adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking, "What makes the most sense right now?

If you don't attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you're unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work.