Attention on J. David Stark

How to Have Your Best Academic Conference

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Academic conferences can be hard to do well. But some simple steps can help you have your best meeting yet.

You Need to Know What's Essential

Mon, 27 May 2024 12:00:00 +0000

The beginning of the school year is one natural time to take stock of what lies ahead. Demands mount (or are about to). How can we stay afloat?

Daily Gleanings: Writing (17 December 2019)

Tue, 17 Dec 2019 16:00:21 +0000

Emmanuel Nataf outlines several concrete practices to develop in order to foster consistent writing.

Daily Gleanings: Freedom (7 November 2019)

Thu, 07 Nov 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Daily Gleanings about Freedom for Chrome OS and Linux.

Daily Gleanings: White-listing (4 November 2019)

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 16:00:00 +0000

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

How to Use Freedom to Support Your Priorities

Mon, 28 Oct 2019 12:00:00 +0000

Freedom is a powerful tool. It allows us to set priorities for our time ahead of time when we’re thinking clearly about what’s most important.

Daily Gleanings: Knowledge Work (22 August 2019)

Thu, 22 Aug 2019 16:00:13 +0000

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: Thoughts from Freedom (31 July 2019)

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 16:00:45 +0000

Daily Gleanings from Freedom about avoiding procrastination and Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s thoughts on how to foster focused work as a busy academic.

Daily Gleanings (5 July 2019)

Fri, 05 Jul 2019 16:00:07 +0000

Daily Gleanings about complex systems, their failure, and remedies for these failures, as well as brief suggestions for restoring motivation.

Daily Gleanings: Attention (1 July 2019)

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 16:00:56 +0000

Daily Gleanings from Dropbox about Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” and Freedom about time tracking.

Daily Gleanings: Avoiding Distraction (25 July 2019)

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 16:00:43 +0000

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: Insights from Freedom (24 June 2019)

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 16:00:37 +0000

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 (29 May 2019)

Wed, 29 May 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Daily Gleanings from Freedom about the new Pause extension for Chrome and from Michael Kruger about contemporary cultural influences on the New Perspective.

Daily Gleanings (8 May 2019)

Wed, 08 May 2019 16:00:00 +0000

De Gruyter Open has a number of volumes in classical and Ancient Near Eastern studies via open access.

HT: AWOL

Freedom continues the dialog over Apple’s added rules that effectively removed much of Freedom’s functionality for new iOS users.

Technology and Distraction

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 13:00:00 +0000

Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google, discusses at TED the interplay between technology, attention, and distraction.

Scheduling focus

Mon, 28 Aug 2017 13:00:11 +0000

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.

Better attention than a goldfish

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 13:00:07 +0000

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.