Tyler

The quality of your attention determines the quality of your life.

If you can’t focus during deep work, borrow Neil Gaiman’s rule: you can either work or do nothing—but nothing else. No phone, no scrolling, no distractions. Sit there until your mind settles. Eventually, boredom makes focus feel like the easiest, most natural thing to do.

Gloria Mark, a researcher studying technology's impact on humans for over 20 years: "What I have seen is that in the last two decades, human minds have collectively undergone a striking change in how they focus on information."

"the difference between “passing the time” and “time well spent” depends on making smart decisions about what to attend to in matters large and small, then doing so as if your life depended on it." - Winifred Gallagher

"From distressing sights to soothing sounds, protean thoughts to roiling emotions, the targets of your attention are the building blocks of your life." - Winifred Gallagher

There is no 'attention centre' in the brain. What we describe as 'attention' is a complex series of processes involving many areas of the brain, working in tandem. This is similar to how we use the terms consciousness or mind.

Neuroscience helped us understand that attention's basic mechanism is a process of selection. It allows us to focus by enhancing the most important physical object or mental subject and suppressing the rest.

Because attention is a series of processes that take place across various parts of the brain, there's no single, widely accepted way that scientists can measure it. Instead, they tend to measure how you perform on various tasks, the outcomes of which require attention.

Given how utterly important attention is in determining our well-being, the better you can understand how attention works, the better you're able to harness it for your benefit.

Today's cult of productivity, lacking any sort of clear measurement strategy, assumes that everything must get done, by any means necessary. Sacrificing anything and everything is the norm.

But there doesn't seem to be any basis for this and in fact it might just be the opposite. Really good work might actually require less.

An assumption rampant amongst today's knowledge workers is that good work necessitates ever-increasing busyness: more meeting and tasks and emails and hours worked.

Cal Newport defines Slow Productivity as a philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles: - 1. Do fewer things - 2. Work at a natural pace - 3. Obsess over quality

According to Cal Newport, pseudo-productivity is the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual product effort.

Cal Newport attempts to provide a more compelling definition of knowledge work than 'sitting in an office typing on a computer'. Knowledge work: the economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort

Slow productivity doesn't require you to denounce ambition. It provides a more sustainable path to producing useful things, which is something humans take great pride in.

Winifred Gallagher describes bottom-up attention as the involuntary process whereby your attention is grabbed by whatever is most salient to you in a given moment. You see a car crash or a loud noise or an old friend and you're immediately focused on it.

Rapidly switching between devices all day long is so commonplace that we forget it's a new behaviour. This wasn't the norm until recently. And now it comprises almost all of a knowledge worker's day. This type of kinetic work IS knowledge work, for all intents and purposes.

We tend to blame the technology itself for distracting us - the rings, dings and pings that pull us in - but nearly as often we distract ourselves: a thought, memory, or impulse arises within us, compelling us to take some sort of action in the moment.

We spend an average of just 47 seconds on a given screen before switching to something else. This holds true not just for younger generations but for baby boomers, Gen X, and millennials.

“Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.” ~Jose Ortega y Gassett