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  • The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation -- New York Magazine

    Extracts: "What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." As... more

    Reviewed by Jaykay586 May 20, 01:50am ( 4 reviews ) • nymag.com

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  • Rated by Arpana-INFJ on Oct 17, 5:18am

    The polymath economist Herbert A. Simon wrote maybe the most concise possible description of our modern struggle: What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

  • Rated by david-de-beer on May 27, 11:44pm

    the higher the volume of information we are submitted to, the more fragmented our attention becomes. Good or bad? An in-depth examination of the role of distraction in our daily lives and specifically as related to use of the internet and social media.

  • Rated by WindPower on May 21, 6:03pm

    It's kind of ironic to stumble upon this article... By being distracted.

  • Rated by Jaykay586 on May 20, 1:50am

    Extracts: "What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." As beneficiaries of the greatest information boom in the history of the world, we are suffering, by Simon's logic, a correspondingly serious poverty of attention. One of the most exciting--and confounding--solutions to the problem of attention lies right at the intersection of our willpower and our willpower-sapping technologies: the grassroots Internet movement known as "lifehacking." It began in 2003 when the British tech writer Danny O'Brien, frustrated by his own lack of focus, polled 70 of his most productive friends to see how they managed to get so much done; he found that they'd invented all kinds of clever little tricks--some high-tech, some very low-tech--to help shepherd their attention from moment to moment: ingenious script codes for to-do lists, software hacks for managing e-mail, rituals to avoid sinister time-wasting traps such as "yak shaving," the tendency to lose yourself in endless trivial tasks tangentially related to the one you really need to do. (O'Brien wrote a program that prompts him every ten minutes, when he's online, to ask if he's procrastinating.) Since then, lifehacking has snowballed into a massive self-help program, written and revised constantly by the online global hive mind, that seeks to help you allocate your attention efficiently. Tips range from time-management habits (the 90-second shower) to note-taking techniques (mind mapping) to software shortcuts (how to turn your Gmail into a to-do list) to delightfully retro tech solutions (turning an index card into a portable dry-erase board by covering it with packing tape). "Where you allow your attention to go ultimately says more about you as a human being than anything that you put in your mission statement," Mann continues. "It's an indisputable receipt for your existence. And if you allow that to be squandered by other people who are as bored as you are, it's gonna say a lot about who you are as a person." (Merlin Mann quote from piece).