Michael Finkel Quotes

There's never enough time to do nothing!

I'm always wondering: Have all these time-saving devices actually saved us any time, or have they just created a million fetishes and obsessions that keep us from the quiet half hour we should be taking to sit and do nothing every day?

I have never managed to put my feet up, ever.

I don't really have days where I can sit and do nothing!

You know what I want to do? Wake up one weekend and not have to go anywhere and do nothing.

If I'm in the country, my big idea is to do nothing. It means talking, it means cooking with the leftovers in the fridge - l'art d'accommoder les restes - it means gardening.

My girlfriend is much better than I am at working hard then resting, and she demands that from me, too. She insists on having time when we don't do anything. We leave the housework and watch a movie.

Sometimes you have to disconnect to stay connected. Remember the old days when you had eye contact during a conversation? When everyone wasn't looking down at a device in their hands? We've become so focused on that tiny screen that we forget the big picture, the people right in front of us.

'Transformers' gives people the ability to relax and rest for three hours. That's a substantial amount of time, given how plugged in to our devices we are. People don't give themselves enough time to sit down. They're no longer comfortable with themselves.

The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.

One of my earliest memories is of seeing my mother in her beach chair, reading a book under an umbrella by the water's edge while my sisters and I played beside her. Of all the life lessons she taught me, that is one of my favorites: to take time at a place I love, restore my spirit with books and the beach.

My mind is constantly going. For me to completely relax, I gotta get rid of my cell phone.

I find often I'm wandering around the park with my kids, and I notice something, and I think, 'Oh, I could come up with a clever Facebook post about that.' It's like, 'Wait a minute - that's not what I should be thinking. I should be present in the moment with my kids.'

I think a lot of us feel the need to always be connected, and finding time to relax and sometimes play is something that I think we all need to make more time for, especially me.

There are plenty of reasons to put our cellphones down now and then, not least the fact that incessantly checking them takes us out of the present moment and disrupts family dinners around the globe.

Almost every time I go to the ocean, I think about throwing my phone right into it. Sometimes, you pull that thing out of your pocket, you look at it, and you're like, 'What was I just going to do with this? Was I going to take a note? Was I going to check my email? Was I going to take a picture?'

You have family and kids, you get home and they want to play with you but you just end up on your phone. I caught myself doing that when my little one wanted a kickaround and I decided I'd had enough.

I am going to spend more time face-to-face with my friends and family. I am going to unplug more.

If I'm on my phone and I'm feeling quite negative, maybe I need to not be on my phone so much.

In a strange way, I feel like we need to cultivate more boredom in our lives: like, boredom needs to be okay again. It needs to be seen as a good thing, and I think it's definitely a good thing for relationships.

Spending more time with friends and family costs nothing. Nor does walking, cooking, meditating, making love, reading or eating dinner at the table instead of in front of the television. Simply resisting the urge to hurry is free.

We're in a digital age where it's cool to be on your iPhone all the time. All of out-of-school activities my daughter has such as piano one day and acting another day and dance another day are about getting her away from that. People are on video games and their phones, and it's taking up all their mental space.

Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

We are speeding up our lives and working harder in a futile attempt to buy the time to slow down and enjoy it.

Under the deluge of minute-to-minute text conversations, emails, relentless exchange of media channels and passwords and apps and reminders and tweets and tags, we lose sight of what all this fuss is supposed to be about in the first place: ourselves.