Untethered technology gives us the freedom to do nearly anything, anytime, anywhere. It can also enslave us - we feel compelled to use it where ever it is. Technology is neutral. How, when and where we use it is up to us.
People hunger for more attention. Full attention will be the aphrodisiac of the future.
We're so accessible, we're inaccessible. We can't find the off switch on our devices or on ourselves.... We want to wear an iPod as much to listen to our playlists as to block out the rest of the world and protect ourselves from all that noise. We are everywhere - except where we actually are physically.
It's no accident that new ideas pop into our heads when we least expect it. In our enthusiasm to be productive, we forget to give our mind/body moments to be "receptive" - that is, open to daydreaming, open to letting our minds wander.
Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool.
When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We're often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing... Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today... to pay partial attention - continuously. It is different from multi-tasking.
Breathing determines emotion. Emotion determines breathing.
Distraction and procrastination come in a variety of flavors... when I'm distracted and I walk over and stare out the window, it's a very different experience than when I feed the distraction by cramming in a few emails or make a phone call.
