Quotes About Focus

In three decades of working with patients, I have found that when you tell your brain what you want, your brain will help you make it happen.

diet high in simple carbohydrates makes attentional problems worse, especially for people vulnerable to ADD. Most ADD children and adults simply do better on a high-protein, low–simple-carbohydrate diet (much more on this later). A lack of protein causes a tremendous problem with focus throughout the day. If a person is vulnerable to ADD, a high-carbohydrate, low-protein diet typically makes their symptoms worse.

Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.

goal-directed self-imposed delay of gratification" is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley Cup. His finding underscores the role of emotional intelligence as a meta-ability, determining how well or how poorly people are able to use their other mental capacities.

It's not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds. Utter concentration demands these inner voices be stilled. Start to subtract sevens successively from 100 and, if you keep your focus on the task, your chatter zone goes quiet.

What you decide not to do is probably more important than what you decide to do.

High performers, its research concludes, work for fifty-two minutes and then break for seventeen minutes.

if we stick with a task too long, we lose sight of the goal

So get rid of the unnecessary obligations, time-wasting distractions, and useless burdens that stand in your way.

And the first step in bulldozing these obstacles is to enumerate them. As Peters puts it, "What you decide not to do is probably more important than what you decide to do.

start planning how to achieve those top five goals. And the other twenty? Get rid of them.

frequent short breaks are more effective than occasional ones

Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.

99 percent of us cannot multitask.

maybe those decisions were bad because he made them in the afternoon

Bezos includes one more chair that remains empty. It's there to remind those assembled who's really the most important person in the room: the customer.

Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one's sights and pushing toward the horizon.

Fully detached beats semidetached.

You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation,   you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon   making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading,   wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function.   How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look.   —W. H. Auden

The good news is that vigilance breaks can loosen the trough's grip on our behavior. As the doctors at the University of Michigan demonstrate, inserting regular mandatory vigilance breaks into tasks helps us regain the focus needed to proceed with challenging work that must be done in the afternoon.

alongside the chairs in which his executives, marketing mavens, and software jockeys take their places, Bezos includes one more chair that remains empty. It's there to remind those assembled who's really the most important person in the room: the customer.

Policy makers and business leaders take note: money matters. But often the best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table—so that people can focus on the work rather than on the cash.

Instead, they spent considerable time accomplishing almost nothing—until they experienced a surge of activity that always came at "the temporal midpoint" of a project.14

sharp-minded analytic capacities peak in the late morning or around noon