Answer complexity with simplicity. Your inbox is puking—from both ends. There’s a line at your door. The damn phone will NOT. Stop. Ringing. Billy's Blackberry has stopped fetching email again. For Christ's sake, Suzy's activated sticky keys on her PC for the second time today. Outlook: "you have had a meeting five minutes ago. And for the love of all that’s productive and holy, that son of b. . . back. Coffee spills. There are just some days when even the most well-stocked project management battleship can’t outmaneuver the little attention-attacking gunboats that sneak up to it. The good news is that you’ve probably already got a weapon close at hand whose biggest asset is that it simply can’t get too heavy to lift.
Take out a little yellow sticky note and write down no more than three things that you want to finish before the end of the day. Make that little, square, yellow piece of real estate your day and tune out everything else. You’ve heard the expression “kill them with kindness.” 7 Organization Tools for Students. The beginning of the school year is when many students (and some teachers) make the resolution to improve their organization skills.
The web is full for tools that can help people organize and keep track of the important things that they need to get done. Here are seven tools that might help your students in their quests to keep track of the things they need to get done this year. The first two services in the list have mobile apps that students can use too. Soshiku is a free personal planner designed for high school and college students. Soshiku lets students organize their assignments by course, add assignments, and receive text message and or email reminders before each assignment is due. Remember the Milk is a free personal organization tool that works online and with mobile phones. Track Class offers all of the features that we have come to expect in online student organizers.
Ta-da List is a simple to-do list creation tool built by 37 Signals. Trimming the attention sails. The Now Habit by Neil Fiore - Dealing with Procrastination | redcatco blog. Now, I was going to read a book on procrastination, but I kept putting it off. It would be funny if it wasn’t true! Procrastination is a major issue in modern life, just check out 43things.com where you’ll find there over 14,000 people who are trying to stop procrastinating – a veritable hive of habit breaking inactivity. You are not alone! It is constantly near the top of the list of bad habits that people want to break.
Procrastination isn’t ‘not doing things’, it can be ‘doing the wrong things’ rather than the right things right now. Procrastination is touched upon in so many books, but it is a very hard thing to deal with. I had not read one of Neil Fiore’s books before, but “Dealing with the Emotional Side of Cancer” had been recommended to me, so I purchased the Now Habit. The Now Habit isn’t perfect as a book or as a system, but nothing is. Here is a brief overview, but there is no substitute for reading the book in full. Introduction to The Now Habit 1. The warning signs: 2. 3. CL link archive (through 2009)
30 seconds to an empty email Inbox (LifeCleve. We all want to control the barrage of emails hurling at us everyday, but often the task is just too daunting. Perhaps, you read Merlin Mann’s Inbox Makeover tutorial or Gina Trapani’s Trusted Trio system for managing email. You might have said, “Wow, this is great and makes a lot of sense. I’m gonna do it now!” Then you turn to your inbox, you see the thousands of emails rotting there, and you end up saying, “Oh shit… that’s a lot of email. I’ll do it later (or never).” Before you give up hope, there’s an instant way to clear your inbox of old emails in about 30 seconds. 30 seconds to zero Put it all in one folder: Create an archive folder In your favorite email program, create a folder and name it “Archive” followed by today’s date.
That’s it! You won’t read 95% of it again Most of the emails festering in your inbox are messages that you’ll never ever read again. Now what? Ok, so you’ve you banished all your old emails, what’s next? Inbox makeover (Gina Trapani) Each e-mail message in your inbox demands your time and attention. Filters and rules are great for reducing some of that demand, shunting easily defined mail such as e-newsletters and personal notes to their appropriate folders. But important e-mail messages are often hard to define and organize with automatic, rules-based management. They require filters and rules that reside only in your brain. The key to managing these important messages is to evaluate each one for the response it requires and then quickly convert that evaluation into action.
What follows is one such system (based in large part on an approach suggested by productivity guru David Allen in his excellent book Getting Things Done ). Your particular work and e-mail volume may dictate some changes to these basic ideas, but they’re a great place to start. Setup Start by stripping your e-mail directory structure down to seven basic folders, each defined by the action that its messages require (See screenshot): Triage Timing. Trusted Trio (Gina Trapani) Multitasking Muddles Brains, (Wired) Some people suspect that a multitasking lifestyle has changed how they think, leaving them easily distracted and unable to concentrate even when separated from computers and phones. Their uneasiness may be justified.
In several benchmark tests of focus, college students who routinely juggle many flows of information, bouncing from e-mail to web text to video to chat to phone calls, fared significantly worse than their low-multitasking peers. Other studies have focused on multitasking’s immediate effects — children doing worse on homework while watching television, office workers being more productive when not checking email every five minutes.
“We wanted to ask a different question,” said Clifford Nass, a Stanford University cognitive scientist. “What happens to people who multitasking all the time?” First, they had to remember the briefly glimpsed orientations of red rectangles surrounded by different numbers of blue rectangles. “The causality question is enormous here,” he said. Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains (Wired) Paying attention isn’t a simple act of self-discipline, but a cognitive ability with deep neurobiological roots — and this complex faculty, says Maggie Jackson, is being woefully undermined by how we’re living. In Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Jackson explores the effects of "our high-speed, overloaded, split-focus and even cybercentric society" on attention.
It’s not a pretty picture: a never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, text messages and tweets is part of an institutionalized culture of interruption, and makes it hard to concentrate and think creatively. Of course, every modern age is troubled by its new technologies. "The telegraph might have done just as much to the psyche [of] Victorians as the Blackberry does to us," said Jackson. "But at the same time, that doesn’t mean that nothing has changed. Wired.com talked to Jackson about attention and its loss. Wired.com: Is there an actual scientific basis of attention? See Also: