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Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

1.5 years of Email Dopamine Addiction | 8 Productivity Habits - 0 views

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    Excellent Blog post by Chris Munch, July 11, 2013 on stopping his dopamine addiction with graphic mainlining-technology image. Excerpt I have an addiction that cost at least 18 months of my life… This was not an addiction with drugs or alcohol, and in-comparison the 'high' was mundane, just avoiding life and responsibility. Months went by, lost to an addictive and bitter procrastination. Nobody was worried, on the surface I looked busy and hard working, yet around me life passed me by while I was infused in a dopamine haze. I'm a recovering addict to email, Skype, Facebook and so many little fun distractions online. My First Step to Recovery I lost about 1.5yrs of my life to email and chat. And then one day I read something which said turn off all auto-checking of email and IM notifications so that you won't get disturbed when you have work to do. I felt pretty dumb having spent the last couple of years doing the opposite, allowing myself to be constantly interrupted. After I made that little change things began to get better. That's when I realized I had an addiction. Even without the auto-alerts I found myself constantly being drawn in to see the latest unimportant message I had received.
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Why Technology Is So Addictive, and How You Can Avoid Tech Burnout - 0 views

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    Blog by Adam Dachis on Lifehacker on living with technology, 8.31.10. Outlines the problem and provides answers. We're surrounded by gadgets that demand our attention, constantly fragmenting our ability to properly focus on the task at hand. Living with technology doesn't mean we have to live with an addiction, however. Here's how to beat tech burnout. Back when we were tethered to desktop computers, this wasn't such a problem. First of all, technology had yet to proliferate in society at the enormous level it has nowadays, but more importantly we didn't have little computers (read: smartphones) that we could stick in our pockets. Previously we might check out email at a few convenient intervals during the day. Now these tiny little multitaskers are requesting our attention wherever we go. We have many more opportunities to interact with information and so we run into two more dilemmas: filtering an information overload and using our technology appropriately. The Solutions So what do we do about it? Overcoming a tech addiction and avoiding burnout requires work. There aren't any magic tricks that'll pave the road to freedom, but here are some ideas to get you started. Out of Sight, Out of Mind Stop Multitasking Never Apologize Get Organized
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Yet another study confirms your tech addiction - TODAY.com - 0 views

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    Excellent blog post by Suzanne Choney, TODAY Tech, 2/3/12, on dopamine addiction to social media. Chastises researchers who are still running experiments noting that it's already been proven--what's the need to do more research? Has some great links to research, writing, etc. on this topic
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

The Power of Focus: How to Stay Focused in the Age of Distraction | Learning Fundamentals - 1 views

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    Colorful, informative graphical mindmap by Jane Genovese at Learning FUNdamentals in Australia for high school students on how to focus in the age of distraction. The branches include taking time to reflect and review, creating rituals/habits, how to work; managing your space, taking a digital technology detox, and help for addicts. From Learning Fundamentals. Also has a presentation for use with with these learning outcomes: By the end of "The Facebook Effect" workshop students will: 1.have developed an understanding of how social network sites (e.g. Facebook) are highly addictive; 2. have developed an understanding of the many benefits of working in a focused manner in a distraction free environment; 3. have access to a range of tools to help them eliminate distractions in their work environment; 4. have a deeper understanding of how multitasking can slow down their mental processes and lead to poorer learning outcomes; and 5. be aware of strategies to enhance their focus and concentration
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Why We're All Addicted to Texts, Twitter and Google | Psychology Today - 0 views

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    Great article by Susan Weinschenk, Brain Wise: Work better, work smarter, September 11, 2012, and why dopamine keeps us "seeking" when we already have enough information. excerpt: Do you ever feel like you are addicted to email or twitter or texting? Do you find it impossible to ignore your email if you see that there are messages in your inbox? Do you think that if you could ignore your incoming email or messages you might actually be able to get something done at work? You are right!" ... "Instead of dopamine causing you to experience pleasure, the latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine causes you to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases your general level of arousal and your goal-directed behavior. From an evolutionary stand-point this is critical. The dopamine seeking system keeps you motivated to move through your world, learn, and survive. It's not just about physical needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts. Dopamine makes you curious about ideas and fuels your searching for information. Research shows that it is the opioid system (separate from dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure." Turn off the cues - One of the most important things you can do to prevent or stop a dopamine loop, and be more productive is to turn off the cues. Adjust the settings on your cell phone and on your laptop, desktop or tablet so that you don't receive the automatic notifications. Automatic notifications are touted as wonderful features of hardware, software, and apps. But they are actually causing you to be like a rat in a cage. If you want to get work done you need to turn off as many auditory and visual cues as possible. It's the best way to prevent and break the dopamine loops. What do you think? How do you deal with dopamine loops? Are you willing to turn off your cues?
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Eradicating Our Dopamine Addiction - Better Humans - Medium - 0 views

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    blog post by Dmitri Dragilev in Better Humans "Dopamine is why CEOs write down goals and vision statements. As you move toward these goals, mentors and advisors reassure you that you are moving in the right direction and every step of the way you get a shot of dopamine. The problem is that all of us have learned how to cheat the system and get shots of dopamine without actually accomplishing anything. Gambling is a great example, every time you pull that handle on a slot machine you get dopamine. Alcohol is the same story, a shot of whiskey = a shot of dopamine, you want more, you repeat; you're not actually moving toward a vision or a goal." I too am guilty of dopamine addiction. I love email and depend on it for a lot of my day to day work. I love instigating stuff, fast back and forths, and knowing what is happening everywhere. But I have found that all this stuff re-prioritizes my day quite a bit. For the past year I have successfully disabled email, Twitter, Facebook, and text message notifications on my phone and have kept it off since then. My life has been transformed. Not only do I find that there are a lot less distractions, I find that I stay focused on the right tasks that keep me marching toward my overall goal. Again, I'm not saying that what I did is the magic formula for everyone. What I am saying is that perhaps it's time to re-assess how much you check your email, text messages, social media and your devices in general and see if you're cheating the system in order to get a rush of dopamine or you're truly marching toward your goal.
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

America's Smartphone Addiction Is Now An Epidemic - 0 views

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    "The convenience of having a computer in our pocket 24/7 has radically changed how we interact with the world, and the grand experiment is changing how we feel about ourselves and others. Perhaps it's time for us to start using technology more responsibly; not as a pacifier, but as a way to actually better ourselves." cartoons about technology
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Half an Hour: What a MOOC Does - #Change11 - 1 views

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    Blog post by Stephen Downes exploring what a MOOC does and does not do--it does not replicate or build on past failed educational pathways where a person--adult or child--is not motivated enough to invest time in his/her own learning path. He mentions that online gaming is the best pre-MOOC and equivalent to MOOC for young people. Makes me wonder about my addiction to WordsFree and Scrabble on my iphone and desire to beat the computer again and again. Or enrolling in a MOOC where the opportunity to connect with smart, similarly-quested learners/achievers/doers must motivate me to overcome challenges of schedule, technology, serendipitous approach to learning, self-expression, etc. The MOOC is simply a much bigger playground where my motivation and my two feet (or eyes!) rule my behavior .
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Software Programs to Manage Your Time - Software to Manage Your Attention - ELLE - 0 views

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    13 apps and programs recommended in Alex Pang's The Distraction Addiction. Maybe useful for uncluttering and intentional priorities learning labs. Appeared in Elle October 11, 2013
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

6 Things The Most Productive People Do Every Day - 0 views

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    blog by Eric Barker on greater productivity, June 1, 2014 1) Manage your mood--If you start the day calm it's easy to get the right things done and focus. "2) Don't Check Email In The Morning" Research shows email: Stresses you out. Can turn you into a jerk. Can be more addictive than alcohol and tobacco. And checking email frequently is the equivalent of dropping your IQ 10 points. 3) Ask whether it should be done at all 4) Focus is nothing more than eliminating all the distractions 5) Have a personal system 6) Define your goals the night before
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Recovering from information overload | McKinsey & Company - 0 views

  • Drucker’s solutions for fragmented executives—reserve large blocks of time on your calendar, don’t answer the phone, and return calls in short bursts once or twice a day—sound remarkably like the ones offered up by today’s time- and information-management experts.2
  • Add to these challenges a torrent of e-mail, huge volumes of other information, and an expanding variety of means—from the ever-present telephone to blogs, tweets, and social networks—through which executives can connect with their organizations and customers, and you have a recipe for exhaustion. Many senior executives literally have two overlapping workdays: the one that is formally programmed in their diaries and the one “before, after, and in-between,” when they disjointedly attempt to grab spare moments with their laptops or smart phones, multitasking in a vain effort to keep pace with the information flowing toward them.
  • First, multitasking is a terrible coping mechanism.
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  • econd, addressing information overload requires enormous self-discipline.
  • Third, since senior executives’ behavior sets the tone for the organization, they have a duty to set a better example.
  • Resetting the culture to healthier norms is a critical new responsibility for 21st-century executives.
  • What’s more, multitasking—interrupting one task with another—can sometimes be fun. Each vibration of our favorite high-tech e-mail device carries the promise of potential rewards. Checking it may provide a welcome distraction from more difficult and challenging tasks. It helps us feel, at least briefly, that we’ve accomplished something—even if only pruning our e-mail in-boxes. Unfortunately, current research indicates the opposite: multitasking unequivocally damages productivity.
  • he root of the problem is that our brain is best designed to focus on one task at a time
  • When we switch tasks, our brains must choose to do so, turn off the cognitive rules for the old task, and turn on the rules for the new one.
  • arely helps us solve the toughest problems we’re working on. More often than not, it’s procrastination in disguise.
  • the likelihood of creative thinking is higher when people focus on one activity for a significant part of the day and collaborate with just one other person.
  • survey of managers conducted by Reuters revealed that two-thirds of respondents believed that information overload had lessened job satisfaction and damaged their personal relationships. One-third even thought it had damaged their health.8
  • ome leaders now explicitly refuse to respond to any e-mail on which they are only cc’d, to filter out issues that others think require no action from them. Y
  • some combination of focusing, filtering, and forgetting.
  • Managing it may be as simple—and difficult—as switching off the input.
  • A good filtering strategy, therefore, is critical. It starts with giving up the fiction that leaders need to be on top of everything, which has taken hold as information of all types has become more readily and continuously accessible.
  • feeling connected provides something like a “dopamine squirt”—the neural effects follow the same pathways used by addictive drugs.9
  • giving our brains downtime to process new intellectual input is a critical element of learning and thinking creatively
  • Getting outside helps—recent research has found that people learn significantly better after a walk in nature compared with a walk in the city.
  • The strategies of focusing, filtering, and forgetting are also tougher to implement now because of the norms that have developed around 21st-century teamwork.
  • But there is a business responsibility to reset these norms, given how markedly information overload decreases the quality of learning and decision making. Multitasking is not heroic; it’s counterproductive. As the technological capacity for the transmission and storage of information continues to expand and quicken, the cognitive pressures on us will only increase. We are at risk of moving toward an ever less thoughtful and creative professional reality unless we stop now to redesign our working norms.
  • First, we need to acknowledge and reevaluate the mind-sets that attach us to our current patterns of behavior.
  • eaders need to become more ruthless than ever about stepping back from all but the areas that they alone must address.
  • eaders have to redesign working norms together with their teams.
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

The peak of 'free' on the Internet - 0 views

  • free things aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. There’s more free product online right now than at any other time in history. We’re talking Daily Show clips, Google Books and entire libraries of music and news from every corner of the globe backed by advertising. Free is bait. It's supposed to get you hooked. If you’ve played many mobile games, this pattern might be familiar. It’s called “freemium,” in which companies offer their apps at no cost and then charge for the good stuff once you’re addicted. (This model is also popular among drug dealers.)
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    Mashable on internet has gone as far as it can with free news, entertainment, services, etc.
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Silicon Valley's Youth Problem - The New York Times - 0 views

  • There are more platforms, more websites, more pat solutions to serious problems — here’s an app that can fix drug addiction! promote fiscal responsibility! advance childhood literacy!
  • The doors to start-up-dom have been thrown wide open. At Harvard, enrollment in the introductory computer-science course, CS50, has soared. Last semester, 39 percent of the students in the class were women, and 73 percent had never coded before.
  • I protested: “What about Facebook?” He looked at me, and I thought about it. No doubt, Facebook has changed the world. Facebook has made it easier to communicate, participate, pontificate, track down new contacts and vet romantic prospects. But in other moments, it has also made me nauseatingly jealous of my friends, even as I’m aware of its unreality. Everything on Facebook, like an Instagram photo, is experienced through a soft-glow filter. And for all the noise, the pinging notifications and flashing lights, you never really feel productive on Facebook.
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  • Amazon Web Services (A.W.S.)
  • “But now, every start-up is A.W.S. only, so there are no servers to kick, no fabs to be near. You can work anywhere. The idea that all you need is your laptop and Wi-Fi, and you can be doing anything — that’s an A.W.S.-driven invention.” This same freedom from a physical location or, for that matter, physical products has led to new work structures.
  • Despite its breathtaking arrogance, the question resonates; it articulates concerns about tech being, if not ageist, then at least increasingly youth-fetishizing. “People have always recruited on the basis of ‘Not your dad’s company,’ ” Biswas said.
  • On a certain level, the old-guard-new-guard divide is both natural and inevitable. Young people like to be among young people; they like to work on products (consumer brands) that their friends use and in environments where they feel acutely the side effects of growth. Lisa and Jim’s responses to the question “Would you work for an old-guard company?” are studiously diplomatic — “Absolutely,” they say — but the fact remains that they chose, from a buffet of job options, fledgling companies in San Francisco.
  • Cool exists at the ineffable confluence of smart people, big money and compelling product.
  • Older engineers form a smaller percentage of employees at top new-guard companies, not because they don’t have the skills, but because they simply don’t want to. “Let’s face it,” Karl said, “for a 50-something to show up at a start-up where the average age is 29, there is a basic cultural disconnect that’s going on. I know people, mostly those who have stayed on the technical side, who’ve popped back into an 11-person company. But there’s a hesitation there.”
  • Getting these job offers depends almost exclusively on the candidate’s performance in a series of technical interviews, where you are asked, in front of frowning hiring managers, to whip up correct and efficient code. Moreover, a majority of questions seem to be pulled from undergraduate algorithms and data-structures textbooks,
  • “People want the enterprise tools they use at work to look and feel like the web apps they use at home.”
  • Some of us will continue to make the web products that have generated such vast wealth and changed the way we think, interact, protest. But hopefully, others among us will go to work on tech’s infrastructure, bringing the spirit of the new guard into the old.
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    Interesting article on the age divide between new guard (Stripe) and old guard companies (Cisco) and why that is so, Yiren Lu, March 12, 2014
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

No Time to Be Nice at Work - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • INCIVILITY also hijacks workplace focus
  • According to a survey of more than 4,500 doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel, 71 percent tied disruptive behavior, such as abusive, condescending or insulting personal conduct, to medical errors, and 27 percent tied such behavior to patient deaths.
  • incivility miss information that is right in front of them. They are no longer able to process it as well or as efficiently as they would otherwise.
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  • Incivility shuts people down in other ways, too. Employees contribute less and lose their conviction,
  • Technology distracts us. We’re wired to our smartphones. It’s increasingly challenging to be present and to listen. It’s tempting to fire off texts and emails during meetings; to surf the Internet while on conference calls or in classes; and, for some, to play games rather than tune in. While offering us enormous conveniences, electronic communication also leads to misunderstandings. It’s easy to misread intentions. We can take out our frustrations, hurl insults and take people down a notch from a safe distance.
  • To be fully attentive and improve your listening skills, remove obstacles. John Gilboy told me about a radical approach he took as an executive of a multibillion-dollar consumer products company. Desperate to stop excessive multitasking in his weekly meetings, he decided to experiment: he placed a box at the door and required all attendees to drop their smartphones in it so that everyone would be fully engaged and attentive to one another. He didn’t allow people to use their laptops either. The change was a challenge; initially employees were “like crack addicts as the box was buzzing,” he said. But the meetings became vastly more productive. Within weeks, they slashed the length of the meetings by half. He reported more presence, participation and, as the tenor of the meetings changed, fun.
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    Article by Christine Porath, June 20, 2015, NYT on rudeness and bad behavior and its impact on us. Has two lists: Boors in the Workplace, Behaviors that we admit to Also has paragraph on impact of multitasking and too much technology
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