Skip to main content

Joel Liu's Library tagged distraction →  View Popular, Search in Google

Mar
29
2012

  • Consuming more than you create -
    Effective people tend to create a lot of content. Content can mean a lot of things - but the rule is always the same, create more than you consume. Ineffective people, on the other hand, spend the majority of their time consuming the fruits of others' labor. They are consummate lurkers.
  • Watching your own vanity metrics -
    Everyone suffers from some level of vanity. A need to be liked. The Internet feeds that need, keeping popularity at the forefront of any online identity with lists of 'Friends,' 'Followers,' 'Connections,' 'Re-Pins' and even the 'Like' itself. Ineffective people tend to feed on these popularity metrics, whereas effective people recognize that these are shallow indicators. Effective people focus more on engagement and strength of relationships; they create quality content to solicit engagement from others, or seek out interesting people and proactively engage them on their own terms.
  • 3 more annotation(s)...
Sep
26
2011

  • Yes. I find myself consuming more and more material that contains information that is more and more trivial.

    Today's haul: found out the name and life story of the guy who played "Hoss" on Bonanza. Read an essay on tax policies in a state several hundred miles from my own. Went through an extended interview (linked from here) about life in North Korea. Researched various types of pulse oximeters. And that's just in the last couple of hours.

    At one point in my life I would have thought "I have a voracious appetite for new knowledge. This is a good thing" But lately I'm seeing this in not-as-flattering terms. I'm more or less picking up little shiny things simply because they glitter. There's no depth or follow-through. There's no long-range goal of acquiring knowledge in any one area. It's all just stimulus-response.

  • I read so much and retain so little. Everything new pushes out something old. Jason Calcanis might be a dick. I'm still working on my conclusion about that.
Jan
19
2012

  • The most remarkable result of the experiment emerged when Small repeated the tests six days later. In the interim, the novices had agreed to spend an hour a day online, searching the Internet. The new scans revealed that their brain activity had changed dramatically; it now resembled that of the veteran surfers. “Five hours on the Internet and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” Small wrote. He later repeated all the tests with 18 more volunteers and got the same results.
  • But as Small was careful to point out, more brain activity is not necessarily better brain activity. The real revelation was how quickly and extensively Internet use reroutes people’s neural pathways. “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate,” Small concluded, “but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”
  • 8 more annotation(s)...

  • Focusing on one task to the exclusion of others isn't even an option anymore. When experts examine the detrimental effects of multitasking on productivity, they're asking the wrong question. We don't need to wonder about the ways in which multitasking and interruption impair our ability to speed through a task. We need to appreciate the ways in which multitasking and interruption have become essential to meeting the increasingly nonlinear demands of our jobs.
Jun
24
2008

  • Chesterfield described dirt as matter out of place. Distracting is, similarly, desirable at the wrong time. And technology is continually being refined to produce more and more desirable things. Which means that as we learn to avoid one class of distractions, new ones constantly appear, like drug-resistant bacteria.
  • I remember when computers were, for me at least, exclusively for work. I might occasionally dial up a server to get mail or ftp files, but most of the time I was offline. All I could do was write and program. Now I feel as if someone snuck a television onto my desk. Terribly addictive things are just a click away. Run into an obstacle in what you're working on? Hmm, I wonder what's new online. Better check.

    After years of carefully avoiding classic time sinks like TV, games, and Usenet, I still managed to fall prey to distraction, because I didn't realize that it evolves. Something that used to be safe, using the Internet, gradually became more and more dangerous. Some days I'd wake up, get a cup of tea and check the news, then check email, then check the news again, then answer a few emails, then suddenly notice it was almost lunchtime and I hadn't gotten any real work done. And this started to happen more and more often.
  • 1 more annotation(s)...
Jul
26
2008

  • In an influential essay in The Atlantic magazine, Nicholas Carr asks: “Is Google making us stupid?” Carr, a chronic distractee like the rest of us, noticed that he was finding it increasingly difficult to immerse himself in a book or a long article – “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” 

     Instead he now Googles his way though life, scanning and skimming, not pausing to think, to absorb. He feels himself being hollowed out by “the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’”. 

  • “I feel that much of my life is ebbing away in the tide of minute-by-minute distraction . . . I’m not certain what the effect on the world will be. But psychologists do say that intense close engagement with things does provide the most human satisfaction.” The psychologists are right. McKibben describes himself as “loving novelty” and yet “craving depth”, the contemporary predicament in a nutshell.
  • 2 more annotation(s)...
1 - 11 of 11
Showing 20▼ items per page

Selected Tags

Related Tags

Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »

Join Diigo
Move to top