The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption

Today, we’re fighting a million Dreyfus Affairs with one another. Rather than focusing on issues, we’ve tribalized into a million little rights and wrongs. In Washington, our completely polarized electorate is distracted from serious, solvable problems because those problems aren’t salient or interesting enough for them to pay attention. What makes

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.

Mass affirmation is the refined sugar of the mind — I’m not talking about the kind of relatively rare positive affirmation you get from friends or family, telling you that you’re loved and respected. Rather, it’s the mass affirmation: the affirmations you get that aren’t intended for you specifically, the stuff that television is best at, but also

I try to limit myself to no more than 30 minutes a day of mass affirmation, and strive to consume much less. It

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

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/

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

Readability charges a minimum membership fee of $5.00 per month that you can increase to however much you want. It takes 30% of the membership fee as its own, then allocates the remaining 70% to the content providers that you read through the service. It’s an invisible, transparent way to support content providers without having to wade through adv

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