Maura Thomas
The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity. —Tom Peters (Location 53)
We’re hung up on the old-fashioned idea of managing time, but to live the lives we really want to live, what we actually need to master is managing our attention. (Location 59)
those devices—and the content we view on them—are intentionally designed to steal your attention. (Location 74)
An app or a website is considered successful when you spend a long time on it and/or come back to it frequently. In fact, your addiction is the ultimate goal,i and developers are using persuasive technology, drawing on neuroscience and behavioral psychology, to deliberately encourage certain behaviors (like scrolling…and scrolling and scrolling!) while discouraging others (like conveying and absorbing thoughtful, nuanced ideas). (Location 75)
Here’s the bottom line: the job of the internet is to keep you on the internet. We’re stuck in a productivity paradox: we need these tools to do our jobs, but the job of these tools is to keep us using the tools, at the expense of doing our jobs…or anything else! (Location 79)
When you change what you’re doing in response to every incoming distraction, you never get the quiet, uninterrupted time you need to get in “flow”—that immersive, highly focused state where you both do your best work and feel most satisfied by your work. Furthermore, if part of your attention is always lured away by these distractions, your mind never gets the calm, restful time it needs to recharge. As a result, you get cranky, impatient, and scattered, and your judgment, learning, creativity, and problem-solving abilities suffer. (Location 101)
But as the nature of work changed, time management ideas didn’t. Today they are outdated. (Location 114)
We all grapple with an influx of communication our parents couldn’t have imagined, and everything seems urgent. That makes it harder to prioritize. (Location 116)