Attention

Academic conferences can be hard to do well. But some simple steps can help you have your best meeting yet.

The beginning of the school year is one natural time to take stock of what lies ahead. Demands mount (or are about to). How can we stay afloat?

Emmanuel Nataf outlines several concrete practices to develop in order to foster consistent writing.

Daily Gleanings about Freedom for Chrome OS and Linux.

Daily Gleanings about Freedom’s release of white-listing for Windows users.

Freedom is a powerful tool. It allows us to set priorities for our time ahead of time when we’re thinking clearly about what’s most important.

Daily Gleanings about the challenges inherent in knowledge work and ways of balancing productive work with healthy engagement in the rest of life.

Daily Gleanings from Freedom about avoiding procrastination and Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s thoughts on how to foster focused work as a busy academic.

Daily Gleanings about complex systems, their failure, and remedies for these failures, as well as brief suggestions for restoring motivation.

Daily Gleanings from Dropbox about Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” and Freedom about time tracking.

Daily Gleanings from Michael Hyatt and Megan Hyatt Miller about how to avoid drifting through life and from Cal Newport about avoiding digital distraction.

Daily Gleanings from Freedom on the new Insight extension for Chrome and on how to manage time effectively and cut the clutter of distraction.

Daily Gleanings from Freedom about the new Pause extension for Chrome and from Michael Kruger about contemporary cultural influences on the New Perspective.

De Gruyter Open has a number of volumes in classical and Ancient Near Eastern studies via open access. HT: AWOL Freedom continues the dialog over Apple’s added rules that effectively removed much of Freedom’s functionality for new iOS users. ...

Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google, discusses at TED the interplay between technology, attention, and distraction.

Freedom has a helpful tutorial about being “more productive in the afternoon.” The same principles apply to whenever is one’s preferred time for focused work.

A recent study commissioned by Microsoft Canada found, disturbingly, that the human participants’ average attention spans had fallen to 8 seconds, a shorter time frame than measured for goldfish ( Evernote, New York Times). One of the major suspected drivers of these results is the propensity of the participants to use a mobile device while “paying attention” to something else. ...