Quotes About Engagement

Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.

it has the three traits that make people love their work: impact, creativity, and control.

Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.

decade: "The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title).

The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.

First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth.

If you're wearing headphones, or monitoring a text message chain, or, God forbid, narrating the stroll on Instagram—you're not really walking, and therefore you're not going to experience this practice's greatest benefits

The key here isn't to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.

To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction. A

Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world,

Professorial E-mail Sorting: Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies: It's ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response. It's not a question or proposal that interests you. Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn't.

Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on." In

What's making us uncomfortable...is this feeling of losing control - a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child's bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience.

Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.

I'm usually facing someone who wants to send twenty-nine emails to fix a problem." His solution is simpler: "Go talk to them.

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.

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.

Humans are naturally biased toward activities that require less energy in the short term, even if it's more harmful in the long term—so we end up texting our sibling instead of calling them on the phone, or liking a picture of a friend's new baby instead of stopping by to visit.

The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, . . . was all about: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?" And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.

When he ran a review of his team's Slack usage, he found that the most popular feature was a plug-in that inserts animated GIFs into the chat conversations.

How do people end up loving what they do?

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

Why do some people enjoy their work while so many other people don't? Here's the CliffsNotes summary of the social science research in this area: There are many complex reasons for workplace satisfaction, but the reductive notion of matching your job to a pre-existing passion is not among them.