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What made Napoleon such an outstanding leader? His strong rapport with his troops, his organizational talents, and his creativity all played significant roles. However, the secret to Napoleon’s success was his ability to focus on a single objective.

t Austerlitz, he quickly recognized a critical high point needed to be taken. “One sharp blow and the war is over,” Napoleon remarked. He then unleashed a ferocious assault that seized the position and split the Russian and Austrian armies. With his enemies divided, he then turned his energy on their left wing, smashing it and sending them into headlong retreat. Within a few weeks, Austria sued for peace.

Modern science has validated Napoleon’s focused approach. At work, we face a variety of demands each day. We may believe we are expert multitaskers, but multitasking is a myth. A Stanford study showed that rather than multitasking, we merely switch back-and-forth between tasks, killing our performance and productivity. Focusing on one task seems daunting, but even five minutes of “monotasking” can significantly boost productivity.

On Wednesday, Kamala Harris will become the first woman, and the first woman of color, to serve as vice president of the United States.Twelve years ago, hundreds of thousands of people filled the National Mall to watch Barack Obama make history as the nation's first Black president.But when Harris takes the oath, the mall will very likely be nearly empty.

A surging pandemic had already led President-elect Joe Biden and Harris to urge supporters to watch the inauguration from home. Now, after a deadly siege of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Trump, thousands of National Guard members have been deployed to protect the transfer of power against more violence. The brazen attempt to block Congress from certifying Biden and Harris' November election victory was unprecedented. But for Harris, the undercurrents of hate and racism it represented were not.

"It was the same thing that went through my mind when I saw Charlottesville. I mean, it's the same thing that went through my mind when I saw a picture of Emmett Till," Harris told NPR

For many Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s — members of Generation Y, or Millennials — particularly middle-class Caucasians, irony is the primary mode with which daily life is dealt.

The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism. The same goes for ironic living. Irony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.

It stems in part from the belief that this generation has little to offer in terms of culture, that everything has already been done, or that serious commitment to any belief will eventually be subsumed by an opposing belief, rendering the first laughable at best and contemptible at worst. This kind of defensive living works as a pre-emptive surrender

And Ms. Trump has used the carefully cultivated image of her own career and family to sell both her brand and her father’s political ambitions. Her Instagram feed is full of images with motivational captions about the importance of stay-at-home motherhood or maternal multitasking, often with the hashtag #WomenWhoWork. “I have a few very important roles, but being a mother will always be my favorite,” she posted with a family photo.

Ms. Trump embodies a feminine ideal, even while she lives a more feminist reality.

Her push for paid parental leave is certainly laudable and especially out of the box for the Republican Party, but the policy she urged her father to propose wasn’t really about parents — it offered maternity leave only, emphasizing that the task of raising children remains the domain of women (even “women who work”). And her soft-focus feminism is put to use covering for her father’s boorishness: Mr. Trump has repeatedly boasted of his refusal to do any child care whatsoever for his five children, but his daughter nevertheless deems him “a feminist.”

Laptops at best reduce education to the clackety-clack of transcribing lectures on shiny screens and, at worst, provide students with a constant escape from whatever is hard, challenging or uncomfortable about learning.

Lawyers can acquire hallmark precision only through repeated exercises of concentration. It does happen on occasion that a client loses millions of dollars over a misplaced comma or period.Once, a senior associate for whom I was working berated me for such a mistake and said, “Getting these things right is the easy part, and if you can’t get that right, what does it say about your ability to analyze the law properly?” I learned my lesson

Students need two skills to succeed as lawyers and as professionals: listening and communicating

“children have to know that life is fine off the screen. It’s interesting and good to be curious about other people, to learn how to listen. It teaches them social and emotional intelligence, which is critical for success in life.”

Children who are heavy users of electronics may become adept at multitasking, but they can lose the ability to focus on what is most important, a trait critical to the deep thought and problem solving needed for many jobs and other endeavors later in life.

An earlier Pew study found that teenagers send an average of 34 texts a night after they get into bed, adding to the sleep deprivation so common and harmful to them. And as Ms. Hatch pointed out, “as children have more of their communication through electronic media, and less of it face to face, they begin to feel more lonely and depressed.”

Olcott wants to know how to measure the return on investment for attention spent, so that individuals could determine how to invest attention rather than merely expend it.

I wonder if our awareness of attention as a quantity to spend is the problem, burdening us with a kind of reflexivity that cannibalizes our experience of being engrossed in an activit

Olcott brings up the received wisdom that our sense of the scarcity of our attention is a product of the sudden information surfeit, which has made us aware of how little time we have for the information we want to consume, or—the same thing—the elasticity of our curiosity when information becomes cheap. Olcott has even attempted to quantify this: “the flow of information clamoring for attention has been increasing at somewhere between 30 and 60 percent per year for the past two decades, while our ability to absorb information has been growing at only about 5 percent per year (and that primarily through our growing tendency to multitask, or do several things superficially rather than one or two things deeply).”

For their sake, Ms. Madrid, who is a Colombian immigrant, has kept Chloé attending school remotely and limited her social interactions. It’s the only way, she says, that all three generations can spend time together safely every few weeks at their second home in the Catskills.

I am Spanish. I am family-oriented. I think of my parents’ needs as my own. My father is 73 and has lung cancer.

This is the new normal.