Why being constantly distracted is making you miserable and how to fix it

Learning to live with more boredom makes it easier for you to really feel present in every aspect of your life: work, relationships, and whatever else you want to do with your time that doesn't involve mindless scrolling on social media.

The way we define the concept of "productivity" really influences our perception.

For a lot of people, this word suggests something cold and corporate, that speaks about efficiency and becoming a robot.

It has to do with focus and allows us to accomplish everything we want to do in a smaller amount of time, so we have more time for what’s actually meaningful to us.

Because being able to focus on things, we see more meaning in them.

• Hyperfocus: it means directing your attention outward. It's the most productive mode of our mind, when one task fills our full attention.
• Scatterfocus: it means directing your attention inward. It's the most creative mode of our mind, when we deliberately let our mind wander.

So we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves.

There’s a mechanism embedded within our mind’s prefrontal cortex called the novelty bias, whereby, for every new, novel thing we direct our attention at, our mind rewards us with a hit of dopamine

We’re perfectly productive when we accomplish what we intend to do.

An intention for a day could be to write a few pages. And if we accomplish that, we’re perfectly productive. An intention for a day could also be to watch five episodes of a TV show and just relax. If we accomplish that, then we’re perfectly productive then as well.