Learn how to achieve flow state and defeat digital distractions through environment design, mindful breaks, and deep work practices for a more focused life.
Deep work. Essentialism in asynchronous culture
Deep work Nowadays, we are getting accustomed to working in a continuously interrupting environment. Smartphone notifications, hundreds of e-mails, open spaces, and meetings slicing our workday. We are feeling busy, and overworked, but are we more productive? If I am a salesman or project coordinator that way of working can bring good effects and even improve my skills. However, for Software Developers, Designers, and other professionals that need a quiet environment for creative effort, it can lead only to frustration and burnout. They need something that is called deep work. Deep work is a concept popularized by Cal Newport in his book under the same title published in 2016. The author divides mental activity into two categories: shallow work, that does not need intensive concentration like sending e-mails, formatting documents, chatting using communicators, etc. deep work, that demands distraction-free focus on one task like writing a document, learning a new skill, designing a software system, etc.
Muse: Designing a studio for ideas
Physical workspaces inspire a fast, fluid digital tool for creative thinking.
Digital Echoes and Unquiet Minds - Christopher Butler
There's a psychological burden of digital life even heavier than distraction.
Article: Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning
Boris Mann's digital garden and personal site.
The lost art of concentration: being distracted in a digital world
We check our phones every 12 minutes, often just after waking up. Always-on behaviour is harmful to long-term mental health, and we need to learn to the hit the pause button
How to balance full-time work with creative projects – The Creative Independent
A guide to finding the right day job, protecting your time, and building creative habits by Jeffrey Silverstein. Illustrated by Sunny Eckerle.
Design Must Learn to Decompose
A meditation on the quiet death of digital things.
Super Productivity – Open-Source Deep Work Task Manager
The open-source deep work task manager for developers. Plan tasks, track time & notes in a privacy-first workspace for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android & iOS.
Don't Get Distracted
I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.
Feeling of Computing — Conversations
Work Smarter: The Cocktail of Simplicity, Manageable Adversity, and Muntzing
Sometimes deliberate roadblocks can be a good thing to get more efficient and effective products and workflow. Here's how.
Design Frictions for Mindful Interactions: The Case for Microboundaries
Design frictions, a term found in popular media articles about user experience design, refer to points of difficulty occurring during interaction with technology. Such articles often argue that these frictions should be removed from interaction flows in order to reduce the risk of user frustration and disengagement. In this paper we argue that, in many scenarios, designing friction into interactions through the introduction of microboundaries, can, in fact, have positive effects. Design frictions can disrupt "mindless" automatic interactions, prompting moments of reflection and more "mindful" interaction. The potential advantages of intentionally introduced frictions are numerous: from reducing the likelihood of errors in data-entry tasks, to supporting health-behaviour change.
be diligent
For individuals It's challenging to work a process when it moves slower than feels appropriate. In the context of computer conversations, the tactic of s...
Revisiting creative behaviour as an epistemic process: lessons from 12 computational artists and designers | Proceedings of the 35th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference
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The Cognitive Debt of Digging Through Preprints
Your Brain on MIT Media Lab
