Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

One of the wisest Buddhist sayings is that pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice. Loss and death are unavoidable. ... You face a similar situation in this superconnected, high-tech world. Information technologies are inescapable... Distraction is a choice.

The great computer scientist Donald Knuth gave up e-mail in 1990, declaring that while e-mail is a ‘wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things... my role is to be on the bottom of things,’ to do fundamental research that required ‘long hours of studying and uniterruptible concentration.’

In the classic Zen in the Art of Archery, Eugen Herrigel’s teacher urged him always to take his next shot unburdened by previous failures to hit the target; as he improved, his teacher urged him not to be influenced by his successes either, to stay in the present moment.

Contemplative computing requires experimentation and reflection; it’s important to try new things, see how they affect your extended mind, and change your technologies to help you develop that mind and support your ability to be creative and focused.

Building up your extended mind isn’t just about adding newer, more sophisticated technologies. ... It’s about choosing and using technologies that help you build habits and cognitive abilities that externalize and thus reinforce mental capabilities.

Recent surveys and field studies have found that a majority of workers have only three to fifteen minutes of uninterrupted working time in a day, and they spend at least an hour a day—five full weeks a year—dealing with distractions and then getting back on task.

This is how we’ve come to believe that world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of practice. But that’s wrong. It comes after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep.

Busy people need to cultivate forms of rest, he [Churchill] began, but are temperamentally unable to simply do nothing. ‘It is not enough merely to switch off the lights which play upon the main and ordinary field of interest,’ he argued. ‘A new field of interest must be illuminated.’ Fortunately, ‘the tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened, not merely by rest, but by using other parts.’

Meditation is the original neuroscience, the world’s oldest conscious exploitation of neuroplasticity, and it’s a twenty-five-hundred-year-old answer to the twenty-five-year-old problem of digital distraction.