Rabbit holes: Why being smart hurts your productivity is a great post on staying focused without losing the value of going down intellectual rabbit holes:

The names change but the story remains the same. Designers find themselves studying fancy, new CSS3 effects when they should have been wire framing their checkout page. Hapless students find that they are on the Wikipedia page for Esperanto instead of writing notes on Norse mythology. Like Alice led into Wonderland by the White Rabbit, geeks too easily fall into “the rabbit hole”.

I won’t spoil the suggestions for you. See also: The potential and dangers of “˜squirrel projects’.

(via Brad Whittington)

This is such a gem of an interview with Andy Ihnatko that it’s hard to pick just one section to quote, but I’ll go with this one:

What’s your advice to new writers?

Build your whole workflow around the “vomit draft.” When you create a blank document, empty your mind of any expectations or aspirations. Just start typing. Never edit anything. Just get it all out of you and into the document. Type, type, type until you get to the end. The results will be horrible, but the hardest work is done: you’ll have taken a nebulous idea out of your head and created something that really exists. Then you fix, fix, fix.

Such great advice - I’ve started doing this on all longer pieces.

Dave DeRuchie makes a strong case that we need to put down our phones and get rid of distractions in meetings:

When you accept a meeting invitation, accept that your attention and focus for that time is also blocked. Avoid distractions that take your focus from the subject matter at hand. Be more connected to what you are doing by being less connected.

There’s another way to look at this. See, we’re distracted in meetings because we don’t find them that valuable, so we try to fill the time with multitasking activities that we feel do add value. So if this becomes a thing - if we agree and communicate that a meeting blocks out not just our time but also 100% of our attention and focus - well, that places a huge burden of responsibility on the meeting organizer. If you’re going to arrange a meeting, and you expect everyone to pay attention without distraction, you’d better make sure that it’s a meeting worth having - agenda, solid outcomes, everyone contributing, etc. Otherwise we’ll come after you and demand our attention back.

Clay Johnson wants us to write 500 Words before 8am:

Starting your day as a producer means that your information consumption has meaning: the rest of the day means consuming information that is relevant to what it is that you’re producing. Waking up as a producer frames the rest of your habits. You’re not mindlessly grazing on everyone’s facebook’s statuses. You’re out getting what it is you need to get in order to produce. Waking up as a producer is procrastination insurance.

“Procrastination insurance.” I like that. This is tricky when you have a 2-year old that you want to read stories to in the morning, and you also need to get a run in before work. But there are other ways to apply this principle. I write most of my longer pieces at night when the family is already in bed. This is not ideal, but I do most of the planning in my head early in the morning while doing other tasks. I also tend to do a lot of design work in the shower - it’s uninterrupted time to think about a problem and come up with possible solutions. Maybe I’m rationalizing, but I choose to view this morning thinking time as part of producing and providing focus for the day to come.

James Hague in Don’t Fall in Love With Your Technology:

Don’t fall in love with your technology the way some Forth and Linux advocates have. If it gives you an edge, if it lets you get things done faster, then by all means use it. Use it to build what you’ve always wanted to build, then fall in love with that.

I know I’m in danger of that with iOS, Mac OS X, and my new-found love affair with text files and Markdown. Hoping that knowing I have a problem is indeed half the battle.

How mankind will cope with the avalanche of information and entertainment about to descend upon it from the skies, only the future can show. Once again science, with its usual cheerful irresponsibility, has left another squalling infant on civilization’s doorstep.

- Arthur C. Clarke in 1962

Nick Carr on the belief that remembering facts becomes less and less important with the increased accessibility of information online:

But this idea that knowledge can be separated from facts - that we can know without knowing - really needs to be challenged before it gains any further currency. It’s wonderful beyond words that we humans can look things up, whether in books or from the web, but that doesn’t mean that the contents of our memory doesn’t matter. Understanding comes from context, and context comes from knowing stuff. Facts become most meaningful when, thanks to the miracle of memory, we weave them together in our minds into something much greater: personal knowledge and, if we’re lucky, wisdom.

Perhaps this is the kernel of truth in the “Google makes you stupid” argument. The field of Information Science teaches that wisdom comes from knowledge, which comes from information, which comes from data. If we can’t hold enough pieces of data in our heads for at least a little while, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

Pico Iyer in The Joy of Quiet:

The urgency of slowing down ”” to find the time and space to think ”” is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

As I’m making my way through The Information Diet, I’m starting to think that this longing for some peace and quiet will be a recurring theme for many of us in 2012.

John Barber writes about the problems with reading on tablets in Books vs. screens: Which should your kids be reading?:

The hyperlinked, text-messaging screen shapes the mind quite differently than the book, according to Wolf. “It pulls attention with such rapidity it doesn’t allow the kind of deep, focused attention that reading a book 10 years ago invited,” she says. “It invites constant change of attention, it invites multitasking. It invites, in other words, a kind of triage of attention.”

Such a skill is certainly necessary in the 21st century, she adds. “But it does not have a place in the deepest kind of immersive thought.”

I’ve definitely noticed this in myself. I get fidgety after reading a few pages on my Kindle, wondering what I’m missing elsewhere on the web. I find myself struggling to embrace boredom. It’s not a good trend.

Related: it’s a good thing I just bought this.

David Eaves wrote a great review of Clay Johnson’s new book The Information Diet:

With information, our problem isn’t that we consume too much. What’s dangerous is consuming an overabundance of junk information - information that is bad for us. Today, one can choose to live strictly on a diet of ramen noodles and Mars bars. Similarly, it’s never been easier to restrict one’s information consumption to that which confirms our biases.

In an effort to better serve us, everywhere we go, we can chomp on a steady diet of information that affirms and comforts rather than challenges - information devoid of knowledge or even accuracy; cheaply developed stories by “big info” content farms like Demand Media or cheaply created opinion hawked by affirmation factories like MSNBC or FOX News; even emails and tweets that provide dopamine bursts but little value.

In small quantities, these information sources can be good and even enjoyable. In large quantities, they deplete our efficiency, stress us out, and can put us in reality bubbles.

It looks like a considered, non-alarmist analysis of the problem, with some good practical advice on how to address it. I just bought it - here’s the Amazon link if you’d like to do the same.