Frank Bures

Focus Power! Tools for Managing Information Overload and Digital Distraction (or Timers, Tools and Self-Flagellators)

frankbures — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:59:33 +0000

Perhaps you remember a quieter, less-connected era. Well, that’s gone. As I wrote about in this month’s Poets & Writers, we will probably never go back to a period when solitude was something to be found in plenty like stones on the beach. For better or worse, the Internet is here to stay. Solitude must be cultivated and engineered into one’s life. As more people struggle with this, more solutions for dealing with it are being developed. I’ve used quite a few of these so-called productivity tools, which also might be called piece-of-mind tools. If social media really is, as David Farley says, like cocaine then here’s your rehab:

For Internet Regulation:
Self Control (Mac)
Self-Restraint (PC)
By far and away the best. Cuts off your computer’s wireless signal. Impossible to reset. Has other settings, which I have not experimented with.
Freedom
Does the same, but early versions could be reset by rebooting your computer. Not sure about the newer ones.
Leechblock (Firefox)
Great for focusing and blocking website you tend to check without thinking.
Stay focused (Chrome)
Same idea for Chrome.
Anti-Social
Blocks social media.
Rescue Time
Much ballyhooed program with a variety of features, most notably analytics about how you spend your time online. (Be afraid!)
About Me
Similar program as an add-on for Firefox.
Readability
Cleans up web pages so you can actually read them.

For on screen distraction/focus
Isolator
Very nice program that lets you work on one program at a time, blacking out others.
Concentrate
A bit spendy, but this is a big suite of things, mostly along the Isolator lines, but also with some Internet control features.
FocusWriter
Similar to Isolator
Now Do This.
If you get the same bizarre, Internet-induced amnesia I do, this helps.
Get Back to Work
Along the same lines, but a little different.
Think
Nice program to clean up your desktop and keep you on task.
Temptation Blocker
To block programs of your choice.

For Tracking Your Time
Hourglassses
That’s what they are. This is your life. Get busy!
Pomodoro Technique
Nice, old-school system for use with a kitchen timer to stay on task.
Mindful Clock
For distracted Buddhists.
Countdown Timer
Nice simple online timer.

For the less tech-savvy:
Build Thoreau’s Cabin
Now all you need is a pond.
Hipster PDA
Funny. Useful.
Cat of Nine Tails
When you need that little extra motivation
Convenient Hands-Free Self-Flagellator
When you’re too lazy to do it yourself.

More links here:
Geek to Live: Ban time-wasting web sites
10 Online Tools for Better Attention & Focus
How To Focus Better
8 Must- Reads About Digital Distraction and Information Overload
Wasting Time: Top 10 Online Distractions
Twitter is harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, study finds
Attention span “Freeing your mind of digital distraction and burnout”

And a few more articles about all this:
Technology Addiction Will Lead to Our Evolution—or Enslavement
Did You Get the Message?
Reading in a Digital Age

Twende Twende (Wainaina and Mtukudzi)

frankbures — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:25:35 +0000

Brilliant new song: “There’s more to Mama Africa than poverty and war.” (Via Chris Vourlias)

Is the Internet Making You Less Creative?

frankbures — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:27:02 +0000

In the current issue of Poets & Writers is a story that was long in coming, on an issue my friends are tired of hearing me harp on: information overload. Obviously, I’m not the first person to write about this, but my concern is not only about the annoyance of dealing with too many data streams. Rather, it’s about the cumulative effect that the constant intake is having on the deeper, more mysterious processes in the mind. Namely, I am concerned about creativity.

Two recent pieces in the New York Times have gotten at this same point. In Pico Iyer’s The Joy of Quiet, he writes that, “Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music.” In Susan Cain’s piece on the New Groupthink and the cult of collaboration, she writes that “solitude is a catalyst to innovation,” and that “Culturally, we’re often so dazzled by charisma that we overlook the quiet part of the creative process.”

This concern is something in the air, but it’s not a new phenomenon. Recently, a friend posted Henry Miller’s Commandments from 1933, the first of which is, “Work on one thing at a time until finished.” And D.T. Suzuki wrote in his 1953 introduction to Zen in the Art of Archery, “Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking.”

For those of us who value solitude it’s a concern that has taken on a new urgency. I don’t pretend to have any answers, but this new piece explores the issue in what I hope is a new way. For example, while there is much talk of “attention” these days, and a growing awareness of its importance, there has been very little discussion of the fact there are different kinds of attention. We have two neurologically distinct attentional systems which work at cross purposes: Focused attention and distracted attention. Which one are you using right now?

The following are my thoughts, along which those of a handful of other writers, on how to keep your inner space alive when the outer one keeps pressing in. As Zadie Smith recently advised,”Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.”

The story can be found here:

Inner Space: Clearing Some Room for Inspiration

You Are Not So Smart

frankbures — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:15:01 +0000

We don’t always know what we think we know. Confirmation bias (your brain’s tendency to cue into, or seek out, information that confirms opinions you already have), the Dunning-Kruger effect (your overestimation of your competence), subjective validation (your tendency to believe vague, positive predictions) – each of these unlocks some quirk of the human mind, some way in which we misperceive the world.

In his entertaining new book, You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself (Gotham, 2011), journalist David McRaney has collected such well-established theories – many of them culled from his blog of the same.

Read the rest here.

Scam I Am: Travelers Beware

frankbures — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:53:29 +0000

Picture, if you will, a tall man walking around Athens. He is staring at the buildings, unable to read the signs. He has only a vague idea of where he is. He has a wild mane of graying hair poking out from under his Gatsby cap, and he would never be mistaken for a Greek.

He’s my father-in-law.

This was some years ago. He told us the story later: A man approached him and introduced himself. He said he’d lived in the United States and wanted to practice his English. My father-in-law said he was in a hurry, but the man insisted on buying him a drink. So he shrugged and went along to a little bar around the corner.

They talked for a few minutes. Then a couple of women joined them, and soon the man disappeared. The women were friendly – very friendly – and started ordering drinks. Then more drinks. “Boy,” my father-in-law thought, “these Greeks sure are friendly.” And then, “I wonder who’s paying for all these drinks?” As he got up to leave, he was presented with a bill for $30.

He got his answer: The sucker was paying.

Read the rest here.

Long Live Long Form

frankbures — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:24:29 +0000

Flying in the face of the ever-shrinking attention span, two new publishers are hard at work pushing long-form narrative nonfiction into new territory. If you’re a writer you’ve probably heard about these. If you haven’t, please check out both Byliner and The Atavist. For a place to start, here are some great stories:

Bill Donahue’s just-released piece The Secret World of Saints, about the world’s first Native American saint.
Matt Power’s Island of Secrets, about one man’s search for an undiscovered kind of tree kangaroo on the island of New Britain.
Dave Wolman’s The Instigators, about the digital activists who started the Arab Spring.
And of course, Jon Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit, about the Greg Mortenson fiasco.

These are perfect for the bus or plane if you have some sort of e-reader. It’s well-worth the $2 or $3 for a great, meaty read. After all, how much did you pay for your last coffee?

Best Book of the Year, 2011

frankbures — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 15:55:24 +0000

This book will not be on anyone’s year-end list. It will not be a bestseller. It will be ignored by scientists and New Agers alike. It will not be read by anyone who believes we basically know what we need to know about the world. Trying to ask hard questions about strange things can be a dangerous walk along a narrow path with Richard Dawkins and the materialist fundamentalists wagging their fingers on one side and a pile of Heaven’s Gate corpses on the other.

Yet Steve Volk shows artfully that it can be done, and in Fringe-ology we find a place in the middle for rational, considered exploration of the things we do not yet understand, a space like the one neuroscientist David Eagleman wants to see carved out. Despite its unfortunate title, Fringe-ology is a rational book, a bold book, an honest book, a humble book, and a book that is not afraid to say when things are ludicrous, when they aren’t and–most importantly–when we simply don’t know.

Lost in Shangri-La

frankbures — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:09:05 +0000

In May 1945, as World War II neared its end, a U.S. military plane crashed high in the mountains of the island then known as Dutch New Guinea. The 24 servicemen and -women aboard the plane had been on a pleasure jaunt, surveying a huge, unmapped valley that was home to a tribe that had first encountered people from the outside world only in 1938.

Most of the passengers died on impact or shortly after. Of the three who survived, John McCollom was unhurt, while Margaret Hastings and Kenneth Decker were badly injured.

Read the rest here.

Business Class: Minneapolis

frankbures — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:05:58 +0000

It was 1996 and the Minnesota winter was just closing in when Christine Fruechte, then a rising star in the advertising world, got a job offer in Honolulu. She jumped at the chance. “When I got there,” Fruechte recalls, “it was 20 below in Minneapolis and 90 degrees in Hawaii. People said, ‘That’s over 100 degrees difference. I can’t even imagine it!’”

Fruechte could imagine it. She even enjoyed it. And just a few years later the lure of the Twin Cities pulled her back.

Read the rest here.

Rare Earth

frankbures — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:53:14 +0000

Very cool set of videos from the Space Station, which you may have seen but are worth seeing again. List of locations can be found here.