Focus

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.

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 on one of their examples from chapter 4 with a view to showing how they think diachony and TC work together.” ...

Daily Gleanings about Hume’s critique of miracles and the downsides of email.

I had two main takeaways from “Free to Focus” that I’ve already started implementing: megabatching and using technology to avoid distracting technology.

Now that we’ve surveyed Michael Hyatt’s “Free to Focus,” we can to offer an assessment of its proposal. In a phrase, it’s “GTD for Essentialists.”

Gleanings about Logos Bible Software, focus, and distraction.

Gleanings about focus, distraction, social media, and essentialism.

Gleanings about focus, distractions, and Paul’s thought about incorporation in the Messiah.

After you stop to discern what’s important, you need to cut out what sidetracks you from focusing on that. Here are three strategies for doing just that.

This post continues reviewing Michael Hyatt’s book “Free to Focus.” Here we concentrate on Hyatt’s advice about “stopping” to to discern what’s important.

TopTracker provides a straight-forward, free time tracking utility that works on both Windows and OS X.

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.

Digital devices and media can make focus difficult. Freedom provides helpful of “training wheels” to foster better focus amid such distractions.

Valerie Bisharat shares some helpful reflections on “how to avoid focus-stealing traps.”

The Dropbox blog has a short essay on the downsides of trying to multitask. Rather than multitasking, deep and singular focus is just what the doctor ordered, but in our hyper-connected world, it isn’t always easy…. You could chuck all your gadgets and move to the woods, but luckily you don’t need to get that drastic. Experts say you can begin to retrain your brain and take advantage of deep focus by concentrating on one thing at a time, managing your use of technology, and reframing the “instant-response” expectations of your colleagues—and yourself. ...

Michael Hyatt has a helpful interview with Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Grand Central, 2016). According to Newport, Focus is now the lifeblood of this economy. Why? Because focus is rare and distraction abundant. As Hyatt comments, ...

Free to Focus logo As part of Michael Hyatt’s Free to Focus resource set, he’s made available three treat the significance for productivity of adequate, quality sleep: Interview with Shawn Stevenson (video) Unleash Nature’s Secret Weapon eBook (PDF) 13 Essential Keys to a Good Night’s Sleep (PDF) Shawn Stevenson’s core business certainly falls in an area where probably few biblical scholars will care to follow. But some of the implications of the expertise that he has for broader productivity applications may indeed prove informative and helpful. ...

Michael Hyatt has a helpful discussion of 10 tips for enabling better focus. For me, suggestions 5 (“Take email … software offline.”) and 6 (“Put on music that helps facilitates concentration.”) have tended to prove particularly helpful. For Michael’s discussion of these tips and the other 8 he provides, see his original post. ...

Going along with his Free to Focus material, Michael Hyatt has a helpful, free resource about eliminating distractions. The material in this resource is designed to work with and complement the content Michael delivers in his webinar, The 7 Deadly Sins of Productivity: The Hidden Habits Undermining Your Performance (And How to Change Them). ...

Via the blog of Michael Hyatt, former CEO of Thomas Nelson, John Dumas highlights three skills to develop in order to be more satisfied with what’s gotten done amid everything that has come along in a given day: productivity, discipline, and focus. ...