Quotes About Focus

The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.

when you add verbiage to a page, you can assume that customers will read 18% of it.

As we multitask online, he says, we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap." The consequences for our intellectual lives may prove "deadly."54

Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning—that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no," says Grafman. "The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem." You become, he argues, more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that's the intellectual environment of the Internet. BACK

Sam Anderson, "In Defense of Distraction," New York, May 25, 2009.

vastly overvalue what happens to us right now,

their eyes skipping down the page in a pattern that resembled, roughly, the letter F.

The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention. That's not only a result of its ability to display many different kinds of media simultaneously. It's also a result of the ease with which it can be programmed to send and receive messages.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

Bruce Friedman,

Intensive multitaskers are "suckers for irrelevancy," commented Clifford Nass, the Stanford professor who led the research.

we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap.

The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.

those with the helpful software were found "to aimlessly click around" as they tried to crack the puzzle.27

He's not seeking some greater truth beyond the work. The work is the truth.

la Red atrae nuestra atención sólo para dispersarla.

What counted was focus, paring down: the form of the Parthenon as opposed to all the ornament and complexities of wedding-cake architecture.

Plato advocated discipline and perfectionism, the effort to produce quality in small quantity rather than a vast range of what is second-rate.

What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

one is creeping into middle age and is less easily distracted by one's appetites, which have grown feeble, and by one's passions, which seem such a bore - all but the consuming desire for knowledge and understanding. That grows. - Aldous Huxley

one is creeping into middle age and is less easily distracted by one's appetites, which have grown feebler, and by one's passions, which seems such a bore - all but the consuming desire for knowledge and understanding. That grows. - Aldous Huxley

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.

seizing the large and letting go of the small" (????),