Work on J. David Stark

You Need to Stop Redoing the Same Work

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 12:00:00 +0000

It’s no fun going in circles, redoing work you’ve already done. But it’s all too easy to do unless you question how you do what you do.

To Be Productive, You Need to Be Adaptable

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 10:25:11 +0000

Adaptability is central to productivity. Especially amid life’s complexities, to stay productive, you need to stay adaptable and open.

Daily Gleanings: Working (24 December 2019)

Tue, 24 Dec 2019 16:00:20 +0000

Michael Hyatt and Megan Hyatt Miller reflect on some “reasons you can’t stop working.”

Daily Gleanings: Productivity (5 December 2019)

Thu, 05 Dec 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Jory MacKay discusses productivity shame and five strategies for coping with it.

Daily Gleanings: Conversations (18 November 2019)

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 16:00:14 +0000

Daily Gleanings about how to be a better conversationalist, not least in professional networking contexts.

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.

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: Planning Preaching (20 September 2019)

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 16:00:21 +0000

Daily Gleanings about planning preaching and coordinating it with academic work.

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 (16 August 2019)

Fri, 16 Aug 2019 16:00:03 +0000

Daily Gleanings from Michael Hyatt and Megan Miller about not investing in the wrong people and from Roger Pearse about hunting for manuscripts online.

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 (16 July 2019)

Tue, 16 Jul 2019 16:00:37 +0000

Daily Gleanings about simple productivity improvements to try and better understanding the importance of networks for work in biblical studies.

Daily Gleanings (20 June 2019)

Thu, 20 Jun 2019 16:00:41 +0000

Daily Gleanings from Michael Kruger about ordination exams (with applications for new faculty) and from Todoist about “eating the frog” for productivity.

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.”

Are You Free to Focus? (Part 4: Acting)

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 12:00:00 +0000

Continued review of Michael Hyatt’s “Free to Focus.” We discuss the three elements of “acting” on what you’ve identified as most important to pursue.

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.

Daily Gleanings (10 April 2019)

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 17:00:16 +0000

Gleanings about moving forward when the next steps look difficult.

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.

Ode to to-do lists

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 13:00:00 +0000

Kristina Malsberger discusses managing oneself and one’s commitments amid a hectic whirlwind of activity. A time-honored key is the daily to-do list.

Reading for writing

Fri, 18 Aug 2017 13:00:00 +0000

Cal Newport outlines the basics of how he reads when working on a project. According to Newport, “The key to my system is the pencil mark in the page corner.”

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.

Humanities Commons

Fri, 09 Jun 2017 13:00:33 +0000

The MLA has started a new initiative, named the Humanities Commons. According to the Commons’s introductory webinar registration page,

Imagine a humanities network with the sharing power of Academia.edu, the archival quality of an institutional repository, and a commitment to using and contributing to open source software. Now imagine that this network is not-for-profit. It doesn’t want to sell your data or generate profit from your intellectual property. That’s Humanities Commons. Run by a nonprofit consortium of scholarly societies, Humanities Commons wants to help you curate your online presence, expand the reach of your scholarship—whatever form it may take—and connect with other scholars who share your interests.

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.

GTD Times

Fri, 19 May 2017 13:00:56 +0000

It’s certainly not new, but I recently came across the GTD Times blog run by the David Allen Company. The most recent entry is the first part of a keynote in which Allen overviews his approach to “getting things done,” as covered more fully in his book by the same title ( affiliate disclosure). If academia should ever manifest itself as an environment with an overabundance of demands, Allen’s advice may be a helpful starting point in adequately coming to grips with that situation.

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,

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.

Remedying overcommitment

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 13:00:51 +0000

Michael Hyatt has a new post where he provides seven strategies for remedying or avoiding overcommitment. All seven suggestions are good and worth considering. But, the capstone suggestion, number seven seems particularly key:

Evernote on minimalism

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 13:00:17 +0000

Although I’ve moved away from using Evernote, their blog still often features interesting content. Recently they’ve had a three-part series on minimalism that heavily leans on Joshua Becker ( part 1, part 2, part 3). Among Joshua’s reflections that the series provides are a two-part suggestion for “saying ’no’ effectively:

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).

Productivity assessment

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 13:00:48 +0000

Michael Hyatt has a free productivity assessment tool that provides “a free analysis of your overall [personal productivity] score and a breakdown of the productivity areas you evaluated.”

A followup email provides a short set of tips for improving, and the analysis page that displays after the survey is completed provides access to sign up for a free webinar on the “7 deadly sins of productivity.” I attended the webinar recently, and it does provide a good number of suggestions revolving around focus as a primary key to productivity.

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.

Tracking Writing Progress

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 11:09:29 +0000

In How to Write a Lot ( affiliate disclosure), Paul Silvia provides his own progress monitoring system as an example (39–45). Since finishing the book last month, I have been adapting Silvia’s database format to a Google Docs spreadsheet that will track some additional data in addition to the data that he finds helpful. Since it has been helpful thus far, I thought I would make it available with some sample data.

Creating Research Timelines in Excel

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:14:01 +0000

Although it certainly can be used otherwise, a progress tracking system like the one Paul Silvia suggests in his book How to Write a Lot seems to work best for writing that can be open ended: by following a regular writing schedule, projects can regularly and reliably come to completion. What happens, however, if one is working under a deadline (be it self-imposed or not) and, therefore, needs to develop a writing schedule backwards from this due date?