J. David Stark

Tag: Productivity

  • Daily Gleanings (13 June 2019)

    Todoist has a helpful guide on getting started with the Pomodoro technique. The guide comments in part: half of all workday distractions are self-inflicted — meaning we pull ourselves out of focus … It isn’t just the time you lose on distractions, it also takes time and energy to refocus your attention. After switching gears,…

  • Daily Gleanings (11 June 2019)

    Michael Thomas discusses the importance of sleep for knowledge work through the lens of a couple key anecdotal narratives. Todoist has published a helpful introduction to “GTD practices and what [they] think is the most intuitive way to implement the[se practices] in Todoist.” The essay comments, in part, that “the key to GTD isn’t the…

  • Daily Gleanings (22 May 2019)

    Freedom discusses how to use their “block all except” whitelisting feature to block out distractions and interruptions. For more discussion of Freedom, see these prior posts. John Meade surveys ch. 4 of Ronald Hendel and Jan Joosten’s How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? (YUP, 2018) and promises a follow-up post “attempting to engage the authors…

  • Daily Gleanings (17 May 2019)

    Peter Gurry and John Meade discuss Phoenix Seminary’s “Text and Canon Institute.” Freedom discusses how to improve work performance by minimizing distractions. The essay is pitched mostly toward employers or those in supervisory roles. But we biblical scholars often work in some ways as our own self-supervisors. So the essay should translate over fairly easily…

  • Daily Gleanings (13 May 2019)

    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. See also “Daily Gleanings: Email (10 May 2019).”

  • Are You Free to Focus? (Part 6: Takeaways)

    Are You Free to Focus? (Part 6: Takeaways)

    The past few weeks, we’ve been discussing Michael Hyatt’s new book, Free to Focus.1 We’ve given some general context for the book and discussed each of its three major sections on stopping, cutting, and acting. Then, last week, we offered an general assessment of the book and its proposal to “achieve more by doing less.”…