Sitemap - 2013 - Rest, Work, and the Good Life

The "Misunderstood" Rorschach test

Selfies and selfishness, or, Google is not a vitamin

A note against the "Don't blame smartphones" argument

Smartphones behave like kids: A new video shows how

Adding qualia to quantity: Linda Stone's idea of the Essential Self

Buddhist Geeks podcast, now featuring more me

"Do you break out in a cold sweat if you forget your smart phone at home?"

"For younger high school boys... social networking has actually improved writing"

Twitter "seems to have been built with uncanny precision to hijack my kind of mind"

Stop multitasking, schedule email, fight the "distraction addiction"... where have I heard all this before?

...in which, in an article on technology and gratification, I assure readers that I'm not a drunk

Clifford Nass

Rest is Not Idleness: John Lubbock, Charles Darwin, and the Value of Daydreams

“It’s not a bad thing to help your technology grow up a little:" Elle Magazine on The Distraction Addiction

Quote of the day

Are you an Internet addict? Take this quiz!

Smartphones will connect urbanites, unless they're getting shot on Muni

CanFocus and push-button concentration

Distinguishing "between the technology that makes your life easier and the technology that breeds mindlessness"

"A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper”

"The point is not to shun technology... [but] to reflect on how it's used"

Is "self-knowledge through numbers" another way of saying "don't ever go offline"?

"Actively ignoring everything that I didn’t think was important enough to distract me felt (and feels) great"

Distraction and mental illness: Can the former cause the latter?

New distracted driving messages

Hand gestures and intelligence

Entering the machine zone

29 million missed stops thanks to distraction

As if we needed more reminders not to drive distracted

Memoto film on lifelogging

"that which is vital we ignore"

"'Information overload' once referred to the difficulty of absorbing intelligently the data produced by others"

Shockingly, best practices in mobile app push strategies don't think much about the user's attention

A good example of how extended minds go bad: Sociopathic drivers

"we couldn’t stand in line somewhere for even five minutes without looking at our phones"

New post on Medium

Damon Young on cyborgs and freedom

Is Google Glass an anti-distraction tool?

Contemplative computing in the Guardian

Iron Man 3 on machines and distractions

Students "could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices"

White Men Wearing Google Glasses was bound to happen sooner or later

Shorter HTC First™ AT&T Commercial: "Blow me, reality"

Texting while walking, coming through!

Time managers were "overwhelmed and... burnt out," while attention manager "reported more flow states."

"I don’t think we want our bodies to be UIs:" wrong ways to think about wearables

"I realized how much richer and more satisfying any experience is when it's not interrupted — even if the interrupter is me."

Philippe Starck: "I live with myself in front of my white page."

More on my whitelist iPhone experiment

"Choose carefully, because you’re choosing your future brain"

Interview about digital distraction on KALW

The airplane is "a good place to code"

Postcast for the radio show

Listen to "Texting and tranquility: Finding mental calm in a sea of distraction" tonight at 7pm

Texting while flying is now a thing

Brain fatigue and walks in Edinburgh

Background noise generator: Rainy Cafe Machine

Self-experiments with tweeting and whitelists

"we can educate ourselves, even in the digital era, to be more attentive"

Against working on planes

Don't like your your phone "buzzing like a beehive with status updates"? Try it on your face!

"If I keep this Internet crap up… I’ll lose roughly a novel and a half to my Internet distractions. That ain’t cute.”

Sergey was right, they ARE emasculating! Smartphone-using men now pee sitting down

On the "slowness" of slow tech: Is it about specs, or about experience?

Today I am a man: I have a tiny computer strapped to my forehead

Worthwhile Canadian Initiative

Facebook "exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does"

The price of attention

Distraction is "the curse of the postmodern age"

Little practices, big results: Nudges toward greater mindfulness

Data-points on digital distraction: Dilbert and Daniel Pink

Restoration, thinking paths and obliquity

The panoptic Gaze was never so stylish: Felipe Luchi's digital device prisons

Excerpt from talk at Hachette Book Group

"The problem is not email. The problem is people."

Horse therapy and Internet addiction

Remodelista's "10 Cures for TechnoStress"

"…an American game called 'Don't be a dick at dinner'..."

"having a Pebble changes the contours of distraction, but doesn’t reduce it"

"there was no alternative to constant, ubiquitous engagement"

Avoid distraction, focus, and finish that script!

Not having WiFi was never so delicious: Kit Kat's No WiFi Zones

"Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself."

Texting from the toilet

Keep Breathing, Never Watch a Loading Screen, and Don't Switch-task, Multitask: iPhone lock screens as nudges

"denial of the health and wellbeing impact of our... constant connection... is equivalent to climate change denial"

Reviewing copy edits

Copy edits!

The next stage of the book

"Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself"

"to be distracted is to be torn away from what is worthwhile in life"