The Benefits of Distraction and Overstim …

The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation:

The brains of Buddhist monks asked to meditate on “unconditional loving-kindness and compassion” show instant and remarkable changes: Their left prefrontal cortices (responsible for positive emotions) go into overdrive, they produce gamma waves 30 times more powerful than novice meditators, and their wave activity is coordinated in a way often seen in patients under anesthesia.

Ooo, here’s another good one:

This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness.

Which just goes to show that Daniel H. Pink might be on to something in his book A Whole New Mind, Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, which I find interesting being overly left-brained but constantly working on developing the other part.

Learned an obvious lesson in productivit …

Learned an obvious lesson in productivity recently. Don’t even look at any email or IMs or Twitter or Facebook until lunch or even the end of the day. I always review before going to bed anyway which makes me enjoy it more and not waste good brain time in the morning on fragmented interests and curiosities pulling at it.

If you want to communicate with me today you will have to have written something to me yesterday. Either that or IM me directly. I imagine this is the why Twitter is so popular. It is when-i-can-get-to-it instant messaging instead of in-your-face instant messaging.

If you can’t make it work for you. Fine …

If you can’t make it work for you. Fine. Don’t use it and go away. That is my reaction to Sean Carton’s recent Is Twitter the Next Second Life? flame bait. People dismissed the web, email, and instant messaging as time-wasting, over-hyped technology and now what. Business efficiency would not exist today without them.

Frankly I grow tired of the insinuation that leveraging new technology is proof that you have too much time on your hands. People tend to measure efficiency by their own abilities. This speaks volumes about their own efficiency, but is irrelevant and unfair when applied to others’ use of that same technology. Following twitter feeds, Facebook, blogs, and even using the archaic ‘VI’ text editor are actually all time savers if you know what you are doing. This simple blog has helped me prioritize work and organize thoughts that would otherwise be lost. Video and other tutorials are as much to capture information I will need again later and have difficulty recalling as they are about sharing that information.

Oh, and here’s a thought. Maybe some of us are so efficient at our day jobs that we can quite easily accomplish all the is required of that job and more in less than your less-efficient expectation.

Efficiency aside, these technologies enable things impossible before now. Meeting someone in a virtual world is the next best thing to being there and often being there just isn’t realistic. Besides, where in the real world would I even have had the opportunity to meet such great friends like professional New York musicians?

I don’t know why I waste time even responding to that blog, but then again, I suppose responding perfectly supports your point. I would not have even read about it were it not for a tweet about it.