A Quote by David Rock
Distractions are everywhere. And with the always-on technologies of today, they take a heavy toll on productivity. One study found that office distractions eat an average 2.1 hours a day. Another study, published in October 2005, found that employees spent an average of 11 minutes on a project before being distracted. After an interruption it takes them 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they do at all.
Related Quotes
It takes 25 minutes to recover from a phone call or an e-mail, researchers have found, and yet the average person receives such an interruption every 11 minutes. Which means that we're never caught up; we're always out of breath, running behind.
On average, Australians watch more than three hours of television a day, compared with 12 minutes a day spent by the average couple talking to each other.
A new study found that most people can't go 10 minutes without lying. But since the study took 20 minutes nobody knows what to believe.
The average person pushes an elevator button 6 or 7 minutes before realizing it's not working. I did a study on this, you know.
Another study, of 38,000 knowledge workers across different sectors, found that the simple act of being interrupted is one of the biggest barriers to productivity. Even multitasking, that prized feat of modern-day office warriors, turns out to be a myth.
Interruptions: The average worker gets interrupted five times each hour. It takes an average of 5 minutes to handle each interruption and 1 minute to get back to what you were doing. This adds up to 30 minutes each hour or 50% of your time!!
You've got to think about "big things" while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.
I was always a guy that would study for three hours and barely get an A on the test and you would have another guy next to me who would study for maybe 30 minutes and ace it.
Men have always been a prey to distractions, which arethe original sins of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system
A touring comic's typical day roughly amounts to an hour of being laughed at and 20 minutes of being photographed. The other 22 hours and 40 minutes are spent in silence.
I spend a lot of time parenting because I'm home. A friend of mine told me that the average father sees each kid an average of twenty-two minutes a week, which I found almost unbelievable. Mine are in my hip pocket all the time. And I like it that way.
I really take pride in doing my own make-up all the time, which takes me about 40 minutes, and my hair takes another 15 to 20 minutes. Putting on my gear is probably another 15 minutes, so all in all, I don't think an hour and a half is too bad!
More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today. So far all these extraordinary furtherers of men whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time.
I do creative visualisation techniques in the morning. It's only 15 minutes. I used to do hours and hours of it, but I found that 15 minutes has really helped me, and it's not time-consuming at all.
The irony of multitasking is that it's exhausting: when you're doing two or three things simultaneously, you use more energy than the sum of energy required to do each task independently. You're also cheating yourself because your're not doing anything excellently. You're compromising your virtuosity. In the words of T. S. Elliot, you're 'distracted from distractions by distractions'.
'Grey Gardens' consumed my life for over two and a half years. It really takes its toll on the family. I'm not there to tuck them in, help them with homework and eat dinner with them. When I work on a show, I only have about 20 minutes a day with my family.
We're spending, on average, 27 minutes a day cooking and about four minutes cleaning up, so basically about a half hour. Any one of TV shows takes twice as long to watch as that, which I think is very interesting because the main excuse people give for not cooking is they don't have time to cook, but somehow they're finding time to watch other people cook or eat on TV.
Related Authors
Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes
French
Historian
Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes
American
Historian
David McCullough Quotes
American
Historian
Edward Gibbon Quotes
English
Historian
Hannah Arendt Quotes
German
Historian
Henry Adams Quotes
American
Historian
Herodotus Quotes
Greek
Historian
Howard Zinn Quotes
American
Historian
Linda Colley Quotes
British
Historian
Livy Quotes
Roman
Historian
Michel Foucault Quotes
French
Historian
Robert Dallek Quotes
American
Historian
Tacitus Quotes
Roman
Historian
Tariq Ali Quotes
Pakistani
Historian
Thucydides Quotes
Greek
Historian
Will Durant Quotes
American
Historian