Deconstructing Yourself

by Michael W. Taft Are you having trouble staying focused on your tax return? Is texting so fascinating that you can’t keep your eyes on the road? Concentration can be difficult for all of us, but it doesn’t actually have to be so hard. With just a few simple tricks and hacks, you can drastically [...]

by Michael W. Taft I was in Paris recently, and visited the Rodin museum. I’ve always loved his work, and some of the best pieces are at this gorgeous 18th century hotel-cum-museum. In the garden outside sat the French sculptor’s most well known piece, The Thinker, atop a tall granite plinth. As I gazed at [...]

Nothing is more important to meditation than the quality of attention. In mindfulness meditation, we are doing more than just concentrating—the point is to concentrate on something useful—but to do it requires high quality attention. Between the rise of mindfulness practices in America and the rise of the Internet and a host of distractions, attention [...]

by Michael W. Taft In the last three articles, I wrote about concentration as an iterative process, the activity of listening, and the skill of breaking things down into smaller, manageable pieces. In other articles we also looked at how multitasking is multi-failing, and ways to reduce distraction. At this point you probably get the [...]

by Michael W. Taft You may think that you are too busy to practice meditation. But there is nobody who doesn’t have a spare minute here or there to be mindful. Even in the midst of a crazy workday, focusing on sensory events now and then is a powerful way to banish stress, anxiety, overwhelm, [...]

by Michael W. Taft You’re having complex feelings about the things that happened with your partner yesterday. You feel upset and confused, there’s so much going on. You meet your friend at a coffee shop, hoping to talk about some of this. But as soon as you start, she digs out her iPhone and starts [...]

by Chris Edgar Most productivity writing is about tips for organizing our workspace — creative ways to arrange our e-mail inbox, write to-do lists, color-code folders, and so on.  These techniques can be useful, but they don’t deal with one of the biggest obstacles to getting our work done:  our own minds. As I’ll bet [...]

by Michael W. Taft Concentration is the eternal secret of every mortal achievement – Stefan Zweig There is an ancient story from India that tells of five young princes who were practicing archery in the woods with their teacher, named Drona. One day Drona decided to test the boys by having them shoot birds—an extremely [...]

by Michael W. Taft You’re working on a paper, and the kids need dinner. Music is playing in one room, and the tv is on in the other. You don’t want to miss tonight’s episode of Futurama, so you peek at that while you type in your notes, getting up every once in a while [...]