Work

It’s no fun going in circles, redoing work you’ve already done. But it’s all too easy to do unless you question how you do what you do.

Adaptability is central to productivity. Especially amid life’s complexities, to stay productive, you need to stay adaptable and open.

Michael Hyatt and Megan Hyatt Miller reflect on some “reasons you can’t stop working.”

Jory MacKay discusses productivity shame and five strategies for coping with it.

Daily Gleanings about how to be a better conversationalist, not least in professional networking contexts.

Daily Gleanings about Freedom for Chrome OS and Linux.

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

Daily Gleanings about how best to minimize the footprint doing email has in your days.

Daily Gleanings about planning preaching and coordinating it with academic work.

Daily Gleanings to help get you started with difficult focused work.

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 Michael Hyatt and Megan Miller about not investing in the wrong people and from Roger Pearse about hunting for manuscripts online.

Freedom interviews Ros Barber on how to nurture the focus necessary for academic and creative writing.

Daily Gleanings about simple productivity improvements to try and better understanding the importance of networks for work in biblical studies.

Daily Gleanings from Michael Kruger about ordination exams (with applications for new faculty) and from Todoist about “eating the frog” for productivity.

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.”

Continued review of Michael Hyatt’s “Free to Focus.” We discuss the three elements of “acting” on what you’ve identified as most important to pursue.

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.

Gleanings about moving forward when the next steps look difficult.

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.

Kristina Malsberger discusses managing oneself and one’s commitments amid a hectic whirlwind of activity. A time-honored key is the daily to-do list.

Cal Newport outlines the basics of how he reads when working on a project. According to Newport, “The key to my system is the pencil mark in the page corner.”

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

The MLA has started a new initiative, named the Humanities Commons. According to the Commons’s introductory webinar registration page, Imagine a humanities network with the sharing power of Academia.edu, the archival quality of an institutional repository, and a commitment to using and contributing to open source software. Now imagine that this network is not-for-profit. It doesn’t want to sell your data or generate profit from your intellectual property. That’s Humanities Commons. Run by a nonprofit consortium of scholarly societies, Humanities Commons wants to help you curate your online presence, expand the reach of your scholarship—whatever form it may take—and connect with other scholars who share your interests. ...

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. ...

It’s certainly not new, but I recently came across the GTD Times blog run by the David Allen Company. The most recent entry is the first part of a keynote in which Allen overviews his approach to “getting things done,” as covered more fully in his book by the same title ( affiliate disclosure). If academia should ever manifest itself as an environment with an overabundance of demands, Allen’s advice may be a helpful starting point in adequately coming to grips with that situation. ...

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, ...

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. ...