Jef Raskin Quotes

If we actually thought about every decision we made, we'd be paralyzed ... You have to decide which decisions you're actually going to make, and then you have to let the rest of them go.

I think we have to focus,on exactly what the priorities are.

People aren't able to make decisions anymore because there's too many choices within that decision.

Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.

When there's so much choice, it can get overwhelming and it's hard to make a choice.

Multi-tasking arises out of distraction itself.

I've found that eliminating not-so-important choices really frees up my mental capacity to think about the important ones.

We're making more and more decisions every day. I think a lot of us feel overloaded by the process.

I love having ten times as much stuff to do as I can possibly find time to do. That way, I can pick the one-tenth that I want to do most. But if I only have enough to just occupy all my time, I'm stuck doing all of whatever stuff it happens to be.

The typical American reports making about 70 [choices] in a typical day.

We also don't always know what we want. And in those cases it can actually make us worse off because it's actually easier to figure out what you want and to figure out how the options differ if you have about a handful of them than if you have a hundred of them.

The explanations for the things we do in life are many and complex. Supposedly mature adults should live by logic, listen to their reason. Think things out before they act. But maybe they never heard what Dr. London told me one, Freud said that for the little things in life we should react according to our reason. But for really big decisions, we should heed what our unconscious tells us.

Don't just put it off and think about it!

Decision making is the specific executive task.

All my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already made.

Too much knowledge never makes for simple decisions.

I would argue that if you understand how the cells of the brain are organized into circuits, almost computational circuits if you will, and we see how information flows through those circuits and how it's transformed, we might have a much firmer grasp on why our brains make decisions the way that they do. If we get a handle on that, maybe we can overcome some of our limitations and at the very least we'll understand why we do what we do.

It's not enough to be talented. It's not enough to work hard and to study late into the night. You must also become intimately aware of the methods you use to reach your decisions.

People will make worse financial decisions for them if they're choosing from a lot of options than if they're choosing from a few options. If they have more options they're more likely to avoid stocks and put all their money in money market accounts, which doesn't even grow at the rate of inflation.

The fact is that you can't do everything that you have to do. You have to procrastinate on something. Therefore, procrastinate on small tasks.

So most of the time when we are confronted by more, rather than a few, choices we're often novices and so we don't really know how to differentiate these various options.

A goal or decision without a deadline has no urgency. It has no real beginning or end.

The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.

The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Get into a fist fight, put your mind on the strategy of the fight, and you will not feel the other fellow's punches.

In a game, there are so many different variables that are thrown at you - the defense, where your teammates are, how fast your body's moving, and you have to be in control of all those decisions.