Why Deep Work Matters in a Distracted World
From the moment we wake in the morning, we’re tempted.
Reach for the phone. Check texts. Read email. Scroll through social feeds. Add a few clicks to news stories and before long, you’ve logged what will likely be the first of more than 76 daily interactions with your mobile device.
Even though mobile devices have increased our access to information and ability to communicate with others, they’ve also introduced barriers that could negatively impact our work.
By understanding how to distance ourselves from distractions and improve time management, we have a better chance to dive deeper into our thinking and reach new heights of productivity.
Battle for our attention
Today, we are engaged in a battle for attention—from a cascading waterfall of social streams, news articles, chatter, and digital noise. We unlock our iPhones an average of 80 times and rack up more than 4.7 hours actively engaged with our mobile device each day.
Thirty percent of our daily media consumption is spent surfing the internet. It’s not just social noise, either. The average American watches 35 hours of television a week, and our viewing habits have taken a dramatic tilt from televisions to devices.
In the ultimate sign that change is afoot in response to our shifting spans of focus, the National Basketball League (NBA), a stalwart of the American sports scene, is exploring ways to speed up the end of games to satisfy shrinking attention spans.
23 Words To Avoid In Your Writing
Spelling and grammar are the cornerstones of professional writing: but that’s only half the battle won. To really make your writing shine, you need to avoid cliches, fluff, nondescript adverbs, redundant phrases, purple prose and filler words. This infographic from GlobalEnglishEditing lists 23 phrases you need to pull back on, along with suggested alternatives.
Confession time: the staff at Lifehacker are guilty of most of these, myself included. So spare us your snarky “author+phrase” Google search results in the comments – we already know!
I also don’t agree with every one of these supposed writing faux pas – the idea that “less is always more” is entirely dependent on the style of the article and the established “voice” of the writer. You wouldn’t ask Charlie Brooker to lose his superfluous asides, for example.
Nevertheless, if you’re looking to declutter your everyday writing, this cheat sheet is worth a look. As the William Strunk Jr quote on the accompanying blog post explains:
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
It’s hard to disagree with that. Check out the infographic below for tips on how to effectively capture your readers’ attention and keep them interested from start to finish.
11 Statistical Tips for a Healthy Marriage
As millions of Americans celebrate love this Valentine’s Day, there are several statistical facts that can help a marriage start off healthy and stay that way for the long run.
Here are 11 tips to keep your marriage healthy.
1. Use premarital counseling. If you aren’t married yet, make sure you include this in your marriage preparation. Research finds couples are 31 percent less likely to get divorced if they have some pre-marriage training.
2. Don’t live together before marriage. While some may claim cohabitation is needed to test compatibility, it actually increases the likelihood couples divorce before their 20th anniversary.
Women who refrain from living with their future husband have a 57 percent probability the marriage will last at least two decades. Those who cohabitate decrease the likelihood of a lasting marriage to 46 percent. The same trends hold true for men.
3. Don’t assume divorce is inevitable. You shouldn’t even assume half of marriages fail. In reality, nearly three-quarters of currently married people (72 percent) are still with their first spouse.
4. Make church attendance a priority. Couples who regularly go to church together report higher levels of happiness than those who don’t. More than 3 in 4 regularly attending couples (78 percent) say they are “very happy” or “extremely happy” in their relationship.
5. Pray together. Almost 8 in 10 couples who pray together almost every week or more (78 percent) say they are “very happy” or “extremely happy” in their relationship. By comparison, only 61 percent who prayed less frequently report the same level of happiness.
Empathy is Key to Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Teen
Emotion coaching parents guide their teens from childhood to adulthood, teaching them how to deeply connect with others and how to integrate logic with emotion to make quality decisions.
The key to being a good emotion coach for your teen is to practice empathy. Kids learn to be emotionally intelligent by being treated with respect and kindness. A teenager who grows up to be an adult with high emotional intelligence (EQ) will have stronger relationships with others and will be more likely to live up to their highest potential. As parents, we can help to make this happen by being present with our teens.
When we think about how distracted and busy we are, being present and emotionally available is no easy task. Factor in the time we spend on our digital devices and it becomes even more complicated.
In a 2016 survey of 1,800 parents, 56% of parents said they are concerned that their children may become addicted to technology. Yet, in the same survey, researchers found that parents spend more than nine hours a day in front of screen, and the vast majority of that time is spent on devices including phones, tablets, and computers. The survey also revealed that despite that huge amount of time we spend online, 78% of all parents believe they are good technology role models for their children.
Stacey is a single mom with a 14 year-old son named Jack. As I greet them in my waiting room, they’re both on their phones – Stacey is responding to work e-mails and Jack is watching a YouTube video.