Attention, Distraction, and Your Responsibility
We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and ke... See more
Jenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Philosophers have been worrying about distraction at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, who saw it less as a matter of external interruptions and more as a question of character—a systematic inner failure to use one’s time on what one claimed to value the most. Their reason for treating distraction so seriously was straightforward, and it’... See more
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Opinion | Chris Hayes: I Want Your Attention. I Need Your Attention. Here Is How I Mastered My Own.
Chris Hayesnytimes.comA life full of distractions is, at an individual level, diminished. When you are unable to pay sustained attention, you can't achieve the things you want to achieve
— Stolen Focus, Johann Hari
The proper response to this situation, we’re often told today, is to render ourselves indistractible in the face of interruptions: to learn the secrets of “relentless focus”—usually involving meditation, web-blocking apps, expensive noise-canceling headphones, and more meditation—so as to win the attentional struggle once and for all. But this is a... See more
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
