Hone Your Craft as a Biblical Scholar
Michael Hyatt and Megan Hyatt Miller discuss how to avoid drifting along without accomplishing what you mean to.
The discussion is directed most immediately at leaders. But as with many such things, there are direct lines of application in other contexts too (e.g., those of us who need to avoid drifting off course from completing a degree or writing project).
Cal Newport discusses digital distractions and how to avoid them on the Entreleadership podcast.
Craig Keener starts discussing some of the problems with David Hume’s criticism of the miraculous.
Cal Newport expands on an earlier reflection about the downsides of email.
Doist provides a “complete guide to deep work.” The essay is mainly geared toward summarizing the advice of Cal Newport’s Deep Work with some additional insertions from Digital Minimalism.
Both books are definitely worth reading. But Doist’s essay is a thorough crash course on the basics.
Douglas Estes offers some helpful reflections on perfectionism, especially as it affects academic writing.
On perfectionism and writing, see also Ryder Carroll’s pithy analysis of perfectionism versus failure.
In episode 173 of the Minimalists’ podcast, the Minimalists discuss digital clutter with Cal Newport based on his new book, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (Portfolio, 2019).
The discussion focuses a good deal on the negative impact of social media on our ability to focus on the work and relationships that matter most.
Recently, I mentioned a short interview between Matt D’Avella and Greg McKeown. There are apparently at least two more forms of this interview.
The mid-length interview of about 30 minutes is also openly available on YouTube. It contains some useful additional reflections on the importance of margin and Greg’s suggestions for how to use margin as a criterion for deciding what opportunities to welcome into your life or not.
Cal Newport reflects on the possibility of deleterious effects of social media on religious practice.
In part, he comments:
Courage, reassurance, revelation: these require a quiet mind capable of apophatic insight. One of the unintentional consequences of innovating an algorithmically-optimized, always-present source of attention-snagging noise is that this quiet disappears.
For more, see Cal’s original post or Digital Minimalism.
CSNTM preserves some new manuscripts currently kept in Texas, including a thus-far-unregistered manuscript still under review by INTF.
TopTracker provides a straight-forward, free time tracking utility that works on both Windows and OS X. The utility allows commenting on each session tracked (e.g., words written during that session). It also allows export via CSV, from where numbers can be crunched further in Excel to see how well progress is going.
By default, TopTracker will upload screenshots periodically while it’s running, but this feature can be disabled and other elements customized in the program’s settings.
For other similar utilities, see the Zapier blog. For additional discussion of the value of tracking writing progress or other “deep work,” see Paul Silvia’s book How to Write a Lot or Cal Newport’s Deep Work.