” Your real competition is your distraction “– Anonymous
If you are reading this, amidst your deep immersive work, you shouldn’t be. This would seem weird coming from the guy who sent you this in the first place.
The achilles heel of our times: Staying focused and distracted by a lot of ideas.
We are living through a crisis of distraction. Plans get sidetracked, friends are ignored, work never seems to get done. Why does it feel like we’re distracting our lives away?
Donuts taste great when we are eating them. But we feel like shit some time after. We get a bit of short-term pleasure and long-term pain.
The two primary motivators of changing our behavior are:
Avoiding pain &
Experiencing pleasure
All the attention management strategies in the world will not work unless we feel the pain and the opportunity cost of distractions.
If anything, the world is becoming a more distracting place. Technology is becoming more pervasive and persuasive.
We all suffer from the shiny object syndrome. The thrill of the chase. And the after glow.
Our biggest obstacle is fighting our addiction with social media and the mobile phone.
Wasting time online, ironically consuming content about how to be a more prolific, successful creator.
Digital distractions create somewhat of a paradox. We get to avoid the pain of focusing on something that matters to us. And the dopamine hits we get from checking our emails or scrolling through our Instagram | Facebook feeds. That gives us a lot of pleasure.
But that little boost of pleasure becomes painful when we realise that we’ve wasted time on something that prevents us from accomplishing our real goals.
It’s hard to change anything until our motivation is strong enough. Before we can deal with our addictions to distraction, it is important to uncover our motivations.
A donut called distraction.
ENDS
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This article first appeared https://www.sureshdinakaran.com
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