Binary Balance

I was recently reading a blog post entitled ‘How to work from home without going insane (purple monkey dishwasher)’ by David Tate.

The post has a lot of good advice and observations in it, relevant to my interests because working from home is something I aspire to be doing more of.

In the section on interruptions, where – referring to adjusting from the more typical office environment to working from home – David writes:

What you will realize is that outside of your normal distractions your body has learned to not focus for very long on anything.

I stopped at that sentence for a moment, because whenever I come across someone talking/writing about how they have trouble focussing – and I come across this reasonably often – it makes me wonder why I usually don’t have this problem. Read more...

There’s been a fair bit written about how people are noticing that the Internet is changing the way our minds work in subtle and perhaps disturbing ways. The gist of it being that the always on, fire hose of information that the Internet has become is turning us into ‘digital gold fish’ and could be the cause or enabler of such coined maladies as ‘Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder’ (somewhat tongue in cheek) or ‘Internet Anxiety Disorder’ (less tongue in cheek). The previous links are a little old, but the more recent articles on this subject are pretty much still saying the same thing. There was even a book written on the subject called The Shallows. Read more...