Distraction Timed

Perspectives

Shouldn’t we all be encouraged to focus less and get distracted more? Tune out of the status quo, blow the arbitrary deadlines and protocols, and spend more time staring at the ingenuity of light refracting on the side of a grey, cement building or the gradation of cloud layers.

01 May 2024 | Allison Hope | Issue 159 (May - Jun 2024)

This article has been viewed 5855 times

I wonder how much time I waste per day on mistakes, distractions, mis-turns. Are there people who don’t get distracted or make mistakes?
What is life if not the amalgamation of a million little observations? A hundred thousand fleeting moments of beauty and terror that were captured when we weren’t on deadline, head-down, trying to focus and be productive and get the thing done. Life happens when we are distracted.
Can you go to the edge of Earth, of life if you’re worried about the end goal? Can you truly explore the depths of human emotion and experience if you are trying to drive efficiencies in your workflow or manage through protocols?

I have given myself approximately two hours, 12 minutes, and 14 seconds to write this essay. The amount of time it takes me to get to work and back on the train.

Now, I have eight seconds less.

More Coverage

Acknowledging Idling

Attention is a very widely used, yet contested term in neuroscience [1], and therefore, easiest to define by its absence. The things we don’t actively do, studied via “resting-state” neural activity, also shape our behavior [2]. There is strong ev...

Burning Books or Preserving Them?

Memorization is an important tool in human development. We memorize for school, learning languages, or for stage performances. Despite criticisms that memorization often comes without understanding and lacks proper contextualization, there is a co...

Believing Hearts

Humankind seems to be heading in some direction – a direction of vengeance and hate. This looks less like “heading in,” and more like “falling into,” a situation one cannot easily guess; a destination one can hardly know. To say that their destina...

Rising Above Cancel Culture: A Call for Compassion and Growth

In 2017, a Harris County Assistant District Attorney in Texas became involved in a case of mistaken identity after a woman with the same name posted racist remarks about African American women on Twitter. In the following weeks, Facebook and Twitt...

{{{_source.title}}} {{#_source.showPrice}} {{{_source.displayPrice}}} {{/_source.showPrice}}