Posts tagged focus

The annual Boring Conference

boredom, boring, trivia, focus, obsession, conference, UK

The annual Boring Conference which is held in the UK as a celebration of “the mundane, the ordinary, the obvious and the overlooked”; subjects which, according to the Boring Conference website, are “often considered trivial and pointless, but when examined more closely reveal themselves to be deeply fascinating”. Previous topics discussed at the conference, which has been running for four years now, include sneezing, toast, IBM tills, the sounds made by vending machines, the Shipping Forecast, barcodes, yellow lines, and the features of the Yamaha PSR-175 Portatune keyboard.

via http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160401-what-i-learned-from-the-most-boring-man-in-britain

Creative People Say No

creativity, time, focus

Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating. Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation. The common thread that links creators is how they spend their time. No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.

https://medium.com/design-thinking–1/bad7c34842a2

Worker, Interrupted: The Cost of Task Switching

interruption, work, stress, multitasking, focus, flow, creativity

I argue that when people are switching contexts every 10 and half minutes they can’t possibly be thinking deeply. There’s no way people can achieve flow. When I write a research article, it takes me a couple of hours before I can even begin to think creatively. If I was switching every 10 and half minutes, there’s just no way I’d be able to think deeply about what I’m doing. This is really bad for innovation. When you’re on the treadmill like this, it’s just not possible to achieve flow.

http://www.fastcompany.com/944128/worker-interrupted-cost-task-switching