Henri Poincaré couldn’t have come up with his solution if he had remained narrowly focused on the math problem he was trying to solve, or if he had been totally distracted. It took mind-wandering to get him there.

It turned out pre-commitment was strikingly successful—resolving clearly to do something, and making a pledge that they’d stick to it, made the men significantly better at holding out.

“you are more efficient when you are rested—that it takes you less time to do things. That you don’t need to have six screens or tabs open when you’re doing your homework just to keep yourself awake.”

site battles alone don’t deliver victory—what they do is establish the crisis clearly in the public’s mind,

Just because you design these products, it doesn’t mean you are more insulated than anyone else from becoming hooked on them.

I felt in that moment that we all have a choice now between two profound forces—fragmentation, or flow. Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes you bigger, deeper, calmer. Fragmentation shrinks us. Flow expands us.

You believe that you are free, and that you make choices, and you have a complex human mind that is selecting what to pay attention to—but it’s all a myth. You and your sense of focus are simply the sum total of all the reinforcements you have experienced in your life.

That’s why McLuhan said that every time a new medium comes along—a new way for humans to communicate—it has buried in it a message. It is gently guiding us to see the world according to a new set of codes. The way information gets to you, McLuhan argued, is more important than the information itself.

These companies are building up a profile of you, to sell to advertisers who want to target you.