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Productivity Is Not About Time Management: It’s About Paying Attention - Skillshare Blog. First, it’s important to tackle what productivity means to people now—multi-tasking and time management. Those two aspects are often at odds. So much of what we need to accomplish these days, we can accomplish using our smartphones. We can stay on top of meetings, in touch with colleagues, and up-to-date with the news while simultaneously performing our other daily tasks. In 2016, research firm Dscout found that we “touch” our phones around 2,617 times a day (perhaps the number’s gone up).

Another study, according to Business Insider, said people with mobile devices engage in about 150 mobile “sessions” per day. During those sessions, people sent text messages, made calls, checked the time, listened to music, played games, used social media (in that order of frequency), and more. When multitasking hurts attention management All this is helpful in terms of multi-tasking, but harmful when it comes to attention management. For example, you may need to use Twitter for work.

Taking Notes By Hand May Be Better Than Digitally, Researchers Say. Laptops are common in lecture halls worldwide. Students hear a lecture at the Johann Wolfang Goethe-University on Oct. 13, 2014, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images Laptops are common in lecture halls worldwide. Students hear a lecture at the Johann Wolfang Goethe-University on Oct. 13, 2014, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous, and with the advent of tablets, the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to many students today.

For one thing, research shows that laptops and tablets have a tendency to be distracting — it's so easy to click over to Facebook in that dull lecture. In the study published in Psychological Science, Pam A. "When people type their notes, they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write down as much of the lecture as they can," Mueller tells NPR's Rachel Martin. “Personal kanban”: a time-management system that explodes the myth of multitasking — Quartz. Multitasking is probably the single most overrated skill in modern life. It drains your brain of oxygenated glucose that could be put toward paying more focused attention, makes it difficult for a person to switch between tasks, and is generally an illusion anyway. Only 3% of the population are “supertaskers,” according to a study from Ohio University.

The rest of us just pretend to be. A number of systems have been developed to save us from our endless to-do lists, which can turn any job into a soulless assembly line of chores. One such system is “Personal Kanban,” which was named for the Japanese concept that inspired it, a just-in-time manufacturing process developed at Toyota in the late 1940s. In an industrial setting, Kanban (which means “signboard” or “billboard” in Japanese, as a recent Medium post explains) relies on tickets that move with each product through a plant.

Find a board with which you can use magnets, post-it notes, or thumbtacks. How to Work Alone. For Adults, Coloring Invites Creativity And Brings Comfort : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture. In 1982, anthropologist Adrienne Zihlman, now professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, published The Human Evolution Coloring Book. Students of biological anthropology were invited to learn about DNA, genes, monkeys and apes — and the fossils, tools and evolutionary relationships of our human ancestors — by coloring in pages rife with factual information presented visually, as well as in words. A Ph.D. candidate back then, I had never encountered such an object before, with its mix of a children's activity, as I then thought coloring to be, and an adult student's science material.

I learned from Zihlman's presentation. Side-by-side skeletal comparisons of the australopithecine "Lucy" and a modern chimpanzee in one case, and robust (large-boned, thick-jawed) and gracile (more slender) australopithecines in another, helped me visualize facts and concepts. Now, 33 years later, I've joined the ranks of adult colorers. Barbara J. Most Useful Websites !!!!!!!! Single-Tasking Is the New Multitasking. Trying To Remember Multiple Things May Be The Best Way To Forget Them. Leigh Wells/Ikon Images/Getty Images Our days are full of things to remember, and they don't always arrive in an orderly fashion. Perhaps you begin your commute home and remember that you need to pick up milk. But then immediately, another to-do springs to mind: You never called back your friend last week. You may try to hold both in your head, but in the end the milk, the phone call or both still sometimes fall away, forgotten.

A new scientific model of forgetting is taking shape, which suggests keeping multiple memories or tasks in mind simultaneously can actually erode them. Neuroscientists already knew that memories can interfere with and weaken each other while they are locked away in the recesses of long-term memory. It argues that when we let multiple memories come to mind simultaneously, those memories immediately lock into a fierce competition with each other. The brain crowns winners and losers. "When you're done thinking about something you totally pack it away.

A Soft Murmur. Why Are We so Distracted All the Time? If your work depends on finding undisturbed time for deep focus and creative thinking, you know all about the modern curse of distraction. (If you’re never distracted, you’re probably a robot. Oh, and I hate you.) What you may not realize is that most of us misunderstand what distraction really is – and clearing up that confusion is an essential first step to any lasting solution.

Instinctively, we divide sources of distraction into two categories. First, there are temptations: when you’re grappling with a tough creative challenge, the idea of a few relaxing minutes on Facebook—or clocking off for drinks with friends—can seem irresistibly alluring. Then there are interruptions: co-workers who won’t stop pestering with questions, emails you’d rather not deal with, or the construction site near my home office where workers compete, so far as I can tell, to hit pieces of metal with hammers as loudly as possible. Why do we fight so hard not to focus on what matters? Doctors Explain How Hiking Actually Changes Our Brains. HOME -The Pomodoro Technique®

What is The Pomodoro Technique? EASY for anyone to use! Improves productivity IMMEDIATELY! FUN to do! Why Pomodoro? The Pomodoro Technique isn’t like any other time-management method on the market today. For many people, time is an enemy. Essential to the Pomodoro Technique is the notion that taking short, scheduled breaks while working eliminates the “running on fumes” feeling you get when you’ve pushed yourself too hard. Whether it’s a call, a Facebook message, or suddenly realizing you need to change the oil in your car, many distracting thoughts and events come up when you’re at work.

Most of us are intimately acquainted with the guilt that comes from procrastinating. Who does the technique work for? These are all ways real folks use the Pomodoro Technique: Motivate yourself to write.Limit distractions.Keep track of how long you’re spending brainstorming / writing / revising.Reduce back and neck pain by walking around during Pomodoro breaks.Draft a book in three weeks. How It works. Taking Notes By Hand May Be Better Than Digitally, Researchers Say.