Attention and Distraction

And why being bored matters.

Photo by James Peacock on Unsplash

Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now and gears us up to notice only that.”

Alexandra Horowitz

When we have got to that point where we are “in flow”, “in the zone”, “cooking on gas”, doing great work, generating insights and harnessing them, all it takes to bring us out of it is the vibration from a phone set to silent. When that happens, it takes around thirty minutes to get back to where we were, and even when we do, it won’t be the same place. We will find ourselves going somewhere different. Put another way, the amount of time we spend on our phones daily, whether on calls or screens, equates to a loss of momentum.

If you make people read quickly, they are much less likely to grapple with complex or challenging material. They start to prefer simplistic statements, other people’s summaries, and now ChatGPT—informational fast food, full of unknown additives.

(I learned of somebody this week saving t…