Quotes About Focus

Dr. James Williams—who works on the philosophy and ethics of technology at Oxford University—he told me: "If we want to do what matters in any domain—any context in life—we have to be able to give attention to the right things…. If we can't do that, it's really hard to do anything.

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

derinlemesine odaklanma biçiminin böyle bir h?zla ve bu ölçüde azald??? bir dünyan?n ba??na neler gelece?ini merak etmeye ba?lad?m. Dü?ünmenin en derin tabakas? gitgide daha az insan?n eri?ebil­di?i, opera veya voleybol gibi sadece ufak bir az?nl???n ilgisini çeken bir ?ey haline geldi?inde neler olacak acaba?

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.

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

When we narrow our attention down into a spotlight to focus on one thing, that takes 'a certain amount of bandwidth,' and when we turn off the spotlight, 'we still have the same bandwidth - it's just we can allocate more of those resources' towards other ways of thinking. 'So it's not like attention necessarily goes down - it just shifts,' to other, crucial forms of thinking.

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

Flow can only come when you are monotasking

To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe. You need to be able to switch off the parts of your mind that are scanning the horizon for bears or lions or their modern equivalents, and let yourself sink down into one secure topic.

psikoloji profesörü olan Jan Tonnes­vang'?n söyledi?ine göre, herkesin bir "ustal?k" duygusuna bir alanda iyi oldu?unu hissetmeye ihtiyac? var. ?nsan?n temel psikolojik ih­tiyaçlar?ndan biri bu. Bir konuda iyi oldu?unuzu hissetti?inizde ona çok daha kolay odaklanabiliyorsunuz; beceriksiz oldu?unuzu hissetti?inizde ise dikkatiniz da??l?p gidiyor.

I would start with three big, bold goals. One: ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can't focus. Two: introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can't pay attention. Three: rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely—in their neighborhoods and at school—because children who are imprisoned in their homes won't be able to develop a healthy ability to pay attention.

It's when you set aside your distractions, he said, that you begin to see what you were distracting yourself from.

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.

But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature—and you build that into your daily life—you begin to train your attention and focus. "That's why those disciplines make you smarter.

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.

You just have to flood the system with more information. The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.

more free play they get, the more sound a foundation they will have for their focus and attention.

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.

I feel instinctively like I've done a good hard day of work when I have been sitting at my laptop, spotlight-focused on tapping out words—at the end of it, I feel a little Puritan rush of pride at my productivity.

He had a sense that the deterioration he was experiencing in his focus was happening to a lot of the people around him – but he also knew that at many points in history, people have thought they were experiencing some kind of disastrous social decline, when in fact, they were merely ageing. It's always tempting to confuse your personal decline for the decline of the human species.

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.

Focus, damn you. I thought back to this moment when, over a year later, I interviewed Professor Gloria Mark, who has spent years studying the science of interruptions. 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.