I have found that more and more it is harder and harder to concentrate and to get things done.  And  I teach people how to concentrate better! Most of the people I talk to about reading confess the same problem.

The New York Times Sunday Review published an article Addicted  to Distraction  by Tony Schwartz, the chief executive of The Energy Project, a consulting firm, and the author, most recently, of “The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working.”  In it he talks about his problem with distraction and how he is working his way through it.  The article has excellent suggestions.  I plan to try them!
My excuse with emails is that I need to see if someone is requesting information or registered for a course.  But I really could check less often and use my screening visual technique to look for those kinds of emails–which I actually do sometimes, but not often enough.

I find interesting articles to read and of course when I go to a website to read it, there are other interesting things to look at–and a lot of time has gone by. I teach people to do an overview of the article they are going to read to get prior knowledge and to keep side bars and illustrations from distracting them.  However, on-line articles constantly intrude on us with the appearance of extraneous links and pop-ups.  We can’t avoid this, but maybe we can avoid getting distracted in the first place.

Let us know if you try some of the ideas in this article and how they worked or if you have some other suggestions.