The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption

Deric Bownds’ Mindblog: http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/ Jonah Lehrer’s Frontal Cortex: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/frontal-cortex/ Re:Cognition: http://thebeautifulbrain.com/category/recognition/

For this book, I worked in 15-minute work intervals with 2-minute breaks three times an hour, and a 9-minute email check at the end of every hour. I stretched, used the restroom, or otherwise didn’t look at the screen for the full two minutes, I found this helped my mind reflect and decompress, so that I could get back to writing. Sometimes those t

Now sometimes this won’t work for you — you may want to pay more attention for longer spurts of time.

Remember to split your intervals up — in any given 60-minute set, you’re going to need at least 2 minutes to stretch and about 10 minutes to deal with email.

It’s likely your mind will beg for you to work on a problem for longer than five minutes. In some cases it might be right, but stick with the program if you can. Even experienced marathon runners often run less distance than they can, so that they can train up for speed and better endurance; similarly, we’re starting off at five minutes to make it

If you’re in one of the dozens of cities lucky enough to be covered by Everyblock, I highly recommend it as an important daily source of information. The site aggregates dozens of data feeds that come from local governments and turns them into an easy-to-read, relatively opinion-free way of seeing what’s going on at the block level — and you’d be s

Kickstarter lets you see what some people (the self-selecting group that uses the service) are passionate about — whether it’s building the world’s largest database, performing analysis of hip-hop music, or writing a guidebook to breakfast joints in Columbus, Ohio. It lets you browse local projects, too, so you can see what kinds of things are star

also did only four hours in a row of this focused task work at a time, followed by at least an hour break

Now, we’re going to start off slow. Try working in five minute intervals, with a one minute break in which you can do anything — check Facebook, deal with Twitter, or check your phone for text messages — anything you want, except check your email (we’ll get to that in a minute). In one hour, try working like this five times, then pause your timer.