Focus on J. David Stark

How to Put More Focus Where You Need It

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Academic life often involves competing demands. But amid its ambiguities, a 4-step process will help you put more focus where you need it.

How to Put More Focus beyond Email

Mon, 09 May 2022 12:00:00 +0000

A 4-step process can help you focus on what really matters. This process can even help you curb something as overloading as email.

6 Steps to Block Your Time for More Focus in a Digital Workspace

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 12:00:00 +0000

However you time block, you can use 6 simple steps can make that process pretty seamless in a digital workspace.

5 Ways You Can Block Your Time to Focus on What Really Matters

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 15:43:29 +0000

These 5 ways to block your time can help you focus on what really matters, rather than what’s just latest and loudest.

Pro Tips for Busy Writers: David DeSilva

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 09:49:42 +0000

David DeSilva provides several pro tips for busy writers in biblical studies. David stresses the importance of “no” and working on one project at a time.

Daily Gleanings: Atomic Minimalism (6 December 2019)

Fri, 06 Dec 2019 16:00:00 +0000

James Clear and Cal Newport discuss the symbiotic relationship their prior work has in terms of fostering focus.

Daily Gleanings: Focus (2 December 2019)

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 16:00:46 +0000

Corey Pemberton discusses eight specific types of challenges with focus and provides some suggestions for overcoming each type.

Daily Gleanings: Digital Distractions (13 November 2019)

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Daily Gleanings about avoiding digital distractions, prioritizing writing, using social pressure, and sleeping.

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.

Pro Tips for Busy Writers: Anthony Le Donne

Mon, 14 Oct 2019 12:00:00 +0000

Anthony Le Donne provides several pro tips for busy writers in biblical studies. Anthony stresses self-awareness and prioritizing your dissertation.

Daily Gleanings: Focus for Study (9 October 2019)

Wed, 09 Oct 2019 16:00:54 +0000

Daily Gleanings from Freedom about how to focus your attention better when studying.

Pro Tips for Busy Writers: Jason Maston

Mon, 07 Oct 2019 16:00:35 +0000

Jason Maston provides several pro tips for busy writers in biblical studies. Jason stresses working on projects that matter to you in your specific context.

Daily Gleanings: Indistractability (4 October 2019)

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 16:00:31 +0000

Daily Gleanings about Nir Eyal’s discussion about how to improve focus and become “indistractable.”

Daily Gleanings: Email (2 October 2019)

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 16:00:54 +0000

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

Daily Gleanings: Freedom for iOS (30 September 2019)

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 16:00:48 +0000

Daily Gleanings about the return of app blocking to Freedom for iOS.

Daily Gleanings: Productivity (24 September 2019)

Tue, 24 Sep 2019 16:00:11 +0000

Daily Gleanings about the importance of focus for productivity and a case study in thinking about productivity in the context of full-time church work.

Pro Tips for Busy Writers: Matthew Bates

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 12:00:36 +0000

Matthew Bates provides several pro tips for busy writers in biblical studies. Matthew stresses the need to stay focused and work on one project at a time.

Daily Gleanings: Consistency (19 September 2019)

Thu, 19 Sep 2019 16:00:05 +0000

Daily Gleanings from Michael Hyatt about the importance of consistent effort over time and this effort’s relationship to (mega)batching.

Daily Gleanings: Focus (16 September 2019)

Mon, 16 Sep 2019 16:00:48 +0000

Daily Gleanings about how to free yourself to focus better on what matters.

Daily Gleanings: Starting (29 August 2019)

Thu, 29 Aug 2019 16:00:54 +0000

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

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: Focus (14 August 2019)

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 16:00:10 +0000

Daily Gleanings about focus and Focusmate.

Daily Gleanings: Ros Barber (13 August 2019)

Tue, 13 Aug 2019 16:00:13 +0000

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

Daily Gleanings (9 August 2019)

Fri, 09 Aug 2019 16:00:22 +0000

Daily Gleanings from Mark Goodacre about “sourceomania” and from Nir Eyal about distraction and focus.

Daily Gleanings: Focus (8 August 2019)

Thu, 08 Aug 2019 16:00:31 +0000

Daily Gleanings from Joshua Becker about the unimportance of the “right” tool or “best” gadget and from Michael Hyatt about the significance of stillness.

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: Freedom (22 July 2019)

Mon, 22 Jul 2019 16:00:10 +0000

Daily Gleanings from Freedom about distractions (digital and otherwise) and how to overcome them to improve your focus on what matters.

Daily Gleanings (12 July 2019)

Fri, 12 Jul 2019 16:00:58 +0000

Daily Gleanings from RBL about Heath Thomas’s commentary on Habakkuk and Rocketbook about maximizing productivity.

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 (22 May 2019)

Wed, 22 May 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Freedom discusses how to use their “block all except” whitelisting feature to block out distractions and interruptions.

For more discussion of Freedom, see these prior posts.

John Meade surveys ch. 4 of Ronald Hendel and Jan Joosten’s How Old Is the Hebrew Bible?(YUP, 2018) and promises a follow-up post “attempting to engage the authors on one of their examples from chapter 4 with a view to showing how they think diachony and TC work together.”

Daily Gleanings (13 May 2019)

Mon, 13 May 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Daily Gleanings about Hume’s critique of miracles and the downsides of email.

Are You Free to Focus? (Part 6: Takeaways)

Mon, 13 May 2019 12:00:00 +0000

I had two main takeaways from “Free to Focus” that I’ve already started implementing: megabatching and using technology to avoid distracting technology.

Are You Free to Focus? (Part 5: Assessment)

Mon, 06 May 2019 12:00:00 +0000

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.”

Daily Gleanings (1 May 2019)

Wed, 01 May 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Gleanings about Logos Bible Software, focus, and distraction.

Daily Gleanings (30 April 2019)

Tue, 30 Apr 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Gleanings about focus, distraction, social media, and essentialism.

Daily Gleanings (29 April 2019)

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Gleanings about focus, distractions, and Paul’s thought about incorporation in the Messiah.

Are You Free to Focus? (Part 3: Cutting)

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Are You Free to Focus? (Part 2: Stopping)

Mon, 15 Apr 2019 12:00:48 +0000

This post continues reviewing Michael Hyatt’s book “Free to Focus.” Here we concentrate on Hyatt’s advice about “stopping” to to discern what’s important.

TopTracker

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 13:00:10 +0000

TopTracker provides a straight-forward, free time tracking utility that works on both Windows and OS X.

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.

Focus—there’s an app for that

Wed, 16 Aug 2017 13:00:00 +0000

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

Staying focused

Mon, 14 Aug 2017 13:00:00 +0000

Valerie Bisharat shares some helpful reflections on “how to avoid focus-stealing traps.”

Toward not multitasking on the Dropbox blog

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 13:00:03 +0000

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.

Hyatt's Interview with Newport

Mon, 01 May 2017 13:00:26 +0000

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,

Free to focus—on sleep?

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 13:00:09 +0000

Free to Focus logo

As part of Michael Hyatt’s Free to Focus resource set, he’s made available three treat the significance for productivity of adequate, quality sleep:

Interview with Shawn Stevenson (video)
Unleash Nature’s Secret Weapon eBook (PDF)
13 Essential Keys to a Good Night’s Sleep (PDF)

Shawn Stevenson’s core business certainly falls in an area where probably few biblical scholars will care to follow. But some of the implications of the expertise that he has for broader productivity applications may indeed prove informative and helpful.

Tips for better focus

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 13:00:24 +0000

Michael Hyatt has a helpful discussion of 10 tips for enabling better focus. For me, suggestions 5 (“Take email … software offline.”) and 6 (“Put on music that helps facilitates concentration.”) have tended to prove particularly helpful.

For Michael’s discussion of these tips and the other 8 he provides, see his original post.

Eliminating distractions

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 13:00:54 +0000

Going along with his Free to Focus material, Michael Hyatt has a helpful, free resource about eliminating distractions. The material in this resource is designed to work with and complement the content Michael delivers in his webinar, The 7 Deadly Sins of Productivity: The Hidden Habits Undermining Your Performance (And How to Change Them).

Skills to cultivate for better work

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 08:00:46 +0000

Via the blog of Michael Hyatt, former CEO of Thomas Nelson, John Dumas highlights three skills to develop in order to be more satisfied with what’s gotten done amid everything that has come along in a given day: productivity, discipline, and focus.