Download or read book Focus in the Age of Distraction written by Jane Piper and published by Ecademy Press. This book was released on 2018-01-11 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world of work has changed but our ways of working haven’t kept pace. We are now working even harder, longer and at a faster pace than ever before. Longer hours and harder work aren’t going to give us the career and life that we want. Today’s work where you’re selling your brain power and creativity, then your focus, attention, mindset and engagement are what will make the difference. 35 practical and pragmatic tips based on latest research in positive psychology, neuroscience, and common sense, will help you be more focused, creative and productive. Be more focused while at work, get more done, learn to switch off, get on and enjoy your life.
Download or read book Handmade written by Gary Rogowski and published by Linden Publishing. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, legendary furniture craftsman and teacher Gary Rogowski offers a profound meditation on finding focus, mental clarity, purpose and clarity in the modern age of distraction.
Download or read book Living into Focus written by Arthur Boers and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today's high-speed culture, there's a prevailing sense that we are busier than ever before and that the pace of life is too rushed. Most of us can relate to the feeling of having too much to do and not enough time for the people and things we value most. We feel fragmented, overwhelmed by busyness and the tyranny of gadgets. Veteran pastor and teacher Arthur Boers offers a critical look at the isolating effects of modern life that have eroded the centralizing, focusing activities that people used to do together. He suggests ways to make our lives healthier and more rewarding by presenting specific individual and communal practices that help us focus on what really matters. These practices--such as shared meals, gardening, hospitality, walking, prayer, and reading aloud--bring our lives into focus and build community. The book includes questions for discernment and application and a foreword by Eugene H. Peterson.
Download or read book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction written by Alan Jacobs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.
Download or read book Staying Focused in the Age of Distraction written by Elizabeth Hanson Hoffman and published by New Harbinger Publications. This book was released on 2006 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book a clinical psychologist and a social worker present a mindfulness and spirituality-based program readers can use to dramatically improve their quality of life by conquering distraction, avoiding overload, and focusing attention on the things they value most.
Download or read book Distracted written by Maggie Jackson and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-05 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an important book...a harrowing documentation of our modern world's descent into fragmentation, self alienation, and emptiness-brought on, to a large extent, by communication technologies that distract us, dislocate us, and destroy our inner lives.--Alan Lightman, author of the bestselling Einstein's Dreams and National Book Award finalist The Diagnosis and MIT professorThis fascinating book on America's collective ADD is a wake-up call to all of us to take back our lives, turn off the technology, and focus on paying attention to what makes us human and fulfilled.--Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School Professor and author of America the Principled and ConfidenceWe have oceans of information at our disposal, yet we increasingly seek knowledge in online headlines glimpsed on the run. We are networked as never before, but we connect with friends and family via e-mail and fleeting face-to-face moments that are rescheduled and interrupted a dozen times. Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment.In this new world, something crucial is missing: attention-the key to recapturing our ability to connect, reflect, and relax; the secret to coping with a mobile, multitasking, virtual world. How did we get to the point where we keep one eye on our Blackberry and one eye on our spouse-in bed? We can contact millions of people worldwide, so why is it hard to schedule a simple family supper? Most importantly, what can we do about it? Distracted vividly shows how day by day, our hyper-mobile, cyber-centric, interrupted lives erode our capacity for deep focus and awareness. The implications for a healthy society are stark.Attention is the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. Jackson makes it clear that if we squander our powers of attention, our technological age could ultimately slip into cultural decline. And yet we are just as capable of igniting a renaissance of attention by strengthening our skills of focus and perception, the keys to judgment, memory, morality, and happiness. Jackson reveals the astonishing scientific discoveries that can help us rekindle our powers of attention in a world of speed and overload. She offers us a wake-up call, and reasons for hope.Distracted is an original exposé of the multifaceted nature of attention, an engaging and often surprising portrait of postmodern life, and a compelling roadmap for cultivating sustained focus and nurturing a more enriched and literate society. More than ever, we cannot afford to let distraction become the marker of our time.Maggie Jackson (New York, NY) is an award-winning author and journalist who writes the popular Balancing Acts column in the Boston Globe. Her work also has appeared in The New York Times and on National Public Radio, among other national publications. Her acclaimed first book, What's Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age, examined the loss of home as a refuge.
Download or read book Distracted written by James M. Lang and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Keeping students focused can be difficult in a world filled with distractions—which is why a renowned educator created a scientific solution to one of every teacher's biggest problems. Why is it so hard to get students to pay attention? Conventional wisdom blames iPhones, insisting that access to technology has ruined students' ability to focus. The logical response is to ban electronics in class. But acclaimed educator James M. Lang argues that this solution obscures a deeper problem: how we teach is often at odds with how students learn. Classrooms are designed to force students into long periods of intense focus, but emerging science reveals that the brain is wired for distraction. We learn best when able to actively seek and synthesize new information. In Distracted, Lang rethinks the practice of teaching, revealing how educators can structure their classrooms less as distraction-free zones and more as environments where they can actively cultivate their students' attention. Brimming with ideas and grounded in new research, Distracted offers an innovative plan for the most important lesson of all: how to learn.
Download or read book The Age of Distraction written by Robert Hassan and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Connections between time, technology, and the processes of reading and writing make clear the links between experiences of what appear to be quite different phenomena. Reading and writing have functioned together in a particular way to build the world as we have known it for three thousand years. These interacting processes have now been transformed at their core and are building a different world, one where certainties of the previous era are disappearing and being displaced by what the author sees as a chronic and pervasive mode of cognitive distraction. Robert Hassan offers a perspective permeated by a sense of history, beginning with the invention of writing and the development of the skill of reading. Together with technological developments, these provide a unique view of the trajectory of modernity into late-modernity, and illustrate how the arc of progress has transformed. New modes of time, technology, and reading and writing are helping create a faster world where we know less about more—and forget what we know evermore quickly. What is the “time” of a thought? Is it possible to measure thinking? Can we consider knowledge or information, or reading and writing, as having temporal “rhythms”? These are questions Hassan tries to answer. So unfamiliar are we to thinking in such terms that they sound impossible. To a significant degree, time, thinking, and many forms of knowledge are the fruits of subjective experience. We connect experiences at superficial levels, where people have different experiences that may be objectively the same, but our interpretations will always diverge in respect of the “reality” we confront. This intersection of philosophy and communication takes the reader into new realms of analysis.
Download or read book The Distraction Trap written by Frances Booth and published by Pearson UK. This book was released on 2013-04-29 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you're worried that you're losing the power to concentrate The Distraction Trap can help. Learn how you can easily release your life from the steely grip of modern technology where you're always available and always connected. Discover how you can radically boost your productivity by keeping your whole brain and both eyes on the task in hand. You may think you can do ten things at once, with a scattered thinking approach and expect to do everything well and on time. Well, you can't. The Distraction Trap will empower you to focus and prioritise, switch off your email, say 'no' to social media ruling your life and help you rediscover your lost powers of concentration. Your campaign to reclaim your life starts here and now!
Download or read book The Thinking Life written by P. M. Forni and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains the importance of thinking in daily life, discussing how to achieve focus, creativity, and a positive outlook in a technology-driven world.
Download or read book The Distracted Mind written by Adam Gazzaley and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-09-23 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why our brains aren't built for media multitasking, and how we can learn to live with technology in a more balanced way. "Brilliant and practical, just what we need in these techno-human times."—Jack Kornfield, author of The Wise Heart Most of us will freely admit that we are obsessed with our devices. We pride ourselves on our ability to multitask—read work email, reply to a text, check Facebook, watch a video clip. Talk on the phone, send a text, drive a car. Enjoy family dinner with a glowing smartphone next to our plates. We can do it all, 24/7! Never mind the errors in the email, the near-miss on the road, and the unheard conversation at the table. In The Distracted Mind, Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen—a neuroscientist and a psychologist—explain why our brains aren't built for multitasking, and suggest better ways to live in a high-tech world without giving up our modern technology. The authors explain that our brains are limited in their ability to pay attention. We don't really multitask but rather switch rapidly between tasks. Distractions and interruptions, often technology-related—referred to by the authors as “interference”—collide with our goal-setting abilities. We want to finish this paper/spreadsheet/sentence, but our phone signals an incoming message and we drop everything. Even without an alert, we decide that we “must” check in on social media immediately. Gazzaley and Rosen offer practical strategies, backed by science, to fight distraction. We can change our brains with meditation, video games, and physical exercise; we can change our behavior by planning our accessibility and recognizing our anxiety about being out of touch even briefly. They don't suggest that we give up our devices, but that we use them in a more balanced way.
Download or read book The World Beyond Your Head written by Matthew B. Crawford and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford explored the ethical and practical importance of manual competence, as expressed through mastery of our physical environment. In his brilliant follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one's own mind. We often complain about our fractured mental lives and feel beset by outside forces that destroy our focus and disrupt our peace of mind. Any defense against this, Crawford argues, requires that we reckon with the way attention sculpts the self. Crawford investigates the intense focus of ice hockey players and short-order chefs, the quasi-autistic behavior of gambling addicts, the familiar hassles of daily life, and the deep, slow craft of building pipe organs. He shows that our current crisis of attention is only superficially the result of digital technology, and becomes more comprehensible when understood as the coming to fruition of certain assumptions at the root of Western culture that are profoundly at odds with human nature. The World Beyond Your Head makes sense of an astonishing array of common experience, from the frustrations of airport security to the rise of the hipster. With implications for the way we raise our children, the design of public spaces, and democracy itself, this is a book of urgent relevance to contemporary life.
Download or read book The Zen of Listening written by Rebecca Z Shafir and published by Quest Books. This book was released on 2012-12-20 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TV, radio, traffic, telephones, pagers - our minds are bombarded daily by constant noise and clutter. No wonder so many people find it increasingly difficult to listen and comprehend. Simple pieces of information such as names go "in one ear and out the other." Poor listening may have tragic consequences such as the Challenger disaster and the Potomac River crash of 1982, or it can result in smaller tragedies such as lost promotions, stalled marriages, and troubled children. Rebecca Shafir assures us that we can transform every aspect of our lives, simply by relearning how to listen. The Zen of Listening is grounded in the Zen concept of mindfulness, a simple yet profound way of learning how to filter our distractions and be totally in the present. Rather than a list of tricks, this book is an all-encompassing approach allowing you to transform your life. Readers will be amazed at how simply learning to focus intently on a speaker improves the relationship, increases attention span, and helps develop negotiating skills. Learn the great barricades of misunderstanding, find out how to listen to ourselves, discover how to listen under stress, and boost our memory. This is a fun and practical guide filled with simple strategies to use immediately to enjoy our personal and professional lives to the fullest.
Download or read book Hyperfocus written by Chris Bailey and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Productivity Project, a groundbreaking and practical guide to managing your attention--the most powerful resource you have to become more creative, get stuff done, and live a meaningful life. Our attention has never been as overwhelmed as it is today. Many of us recognize that our brains struggle to multitask. Despite this, we feel compelled to fill each moment of our lives to the brim with essential tasks and mindless distraction. Hyperfocus provides profound insights into how you can best take charge of your attention to achieve a greater sense of purpose and productivity throughout the day. The most recent neuroscientific research reveals that the brain has two powerful modes that can be unlocked when we use our attention effectively: a focused mode (hyperfocus), which is the foundation for being highly productive, and a creative mode (scatterfocus), which enables us to connect ideas in novel ways. Hyperfocus helps you access both mental modes so you can concentrate more deeply, think more clearly, and work and live more deliberately every day. Chris Bailey examines topics such as: identifying and dealing with the four key types of distraction and interruption; establishing a clear physical and mental environment in which to work; controlling motivation and working fewer hours to become more productive; taking time-outs with intention; multitasking strategically; and learning when to pay attention and when to let your mind wander wherever it wants to. By transforming how you think about your attention, Hyperfocus reveals that the more effectively you learn to take charge of it, the better you'll be able to manage every aspect of your life.
Download or read book Distraction written by Mark Curtis and published by Futuretext. This book was released on 2005 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steps back to look at our use of technology and draws some uncomfortable and challenging conclusions about what society may need to do to get the best, not the worst, out of the digital era. Why are our fundamental notions of space and time changing? Why going mobile is the big difference? Can we sustain current levels of communication? And more.
Download or read book Find Your Focus Zone written by Lucy Jo Palladino and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being able to perform any task with full attention has become one of the great unspoken-about challenges of modern life. As our culture has become more high-speed, techno-stressed, information-cluttered and media-saturated, we are getting pushed out of our focus zones without even realising it. If you work in a modern office, it is likely you are suffering from 'information fatigue syndrome', which means that even naturally bright and creative people are rendered incapable of making swift decisions, problem-solving efficiently or able to maintain appropriate energy levels. Award-winning psychologist Lucy Jo Palladino offers practical solutions for anyone juggling too much, who finds themselves in a state of 'continuous partial attention', seemingly unable to do any one task with full concentration. In order to help people combat the negative aspects of 'always-on' information culture, Palladino has come up with a new set of skills that will help readers beat distraction and win the fight against information overload. She provides eight sets of 'keys' that will unlock your best attention and help you balance adrenaline levels, even when you are under pressure or facing dull tasks. Rooted in sports performance psychology, yet practical and user-friendly, Palladino's cutting-edge methods will help you stay focused and enhance your performance in all areas of daily life where concentration is required.
Download or read book Deep Work written by Cal Newport and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN AMAZON BEST BOOK OF 2O16 PICK IN BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP WALL STREET JOURNAL BUSINESS BESTSELLER A BUSINESS BOOK OF THE WEEK AT 800-CEO-READ Master one of our economy’s most rare skills and achieve groundbreaking results with this “exciting” book (Daniel H. Pink) from an “exceptional” author (New York Times Book Review). Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep Work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way. In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four "rules," for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill. 1. Work Deeply 2. Embrace Boredom 3. Quit Social Media 4. Drain the Shallows A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.
