The Cost of Continuously Checking Email

This article appeared in the Harvard Business Review and is deeply poignant in our distracted and fragmented world. Suppose each time you ran low on an item in your kitchen - olive oil, bananas, napkins—your instinctive response was to drop everything and race to the store. How much time would you lose? How much money would you …

8 Tips for Beating Busyness

Ever feel like the guy in the picture? More and more research is proving that our always-on, multi-tasking work environments and lifestyles are dampening creativity, killing productivity, and making us unhappy. Now, we can become victims of this reality, or we can become proactive.  As Wilhelm von Humboldt writes, "I am more and more convinced that our happiness or …

The Cult of Multi-Tasking

Hi my name is Tom, and I am a multi-tasker. I confess. Far too often I am so busy checking my email, writing a message, answering a text, writing down an idea (possibly at the same time) that I miss the person standing right in front of me. Sometimes I think this is part of …

7 Ways to Turn Off Technology and Get More Done!

Studies show that the average worker is interrupted every 11 minutes! Distractions destroy productivity and complicate your life. And you can't blame others entirely for this. Tim Ferris, in his book "The 4-Hour Work Week" says that  "Blaming idiots for interruptions is like blaming clowns for scaring children—they can’t help it. It’s their nature." Often …

16 Tips to Simplify Your Life (and Increase Your Productivity)

Someone once said "it takes a genius to live a simple life" and I totally agree with that. In this world of "dramatic distraction" and information overload it is too easy to become overwhelmed, lose focus and be swept away from the things that matter most. Here are 16 tips that I have learnt from …