Ken Cooper | Teaching Innovation.

Tony Schwartz's recent post The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time made a convincing case for staying focused. His claim that multitasking reduces individual productivity by about 25% is well supported by a mountain of research and other evidence.

Schwartz...

Technology is meant to serve us. Instead it increasingly runs us — and runs us down.

Where we put our focus shapes our agenda and defines our experience in every moment. More and more, we're turning over this precious resource to our digital technology, allowing it to define the depth and span of our attention, and to seduce us into operating at such high speeds that we don't notice the insidious toll that's taking.

I see it in myself, as I fight to stay focused on...

"Here's my problem with email," Jane*, a lawyer friend of mine told me recently, "I open Outlook expecting to quickly check my email, but then I read an email with a link in it, I follow the link, and then I'm lost on the internet for hours."

"My job is to be on email," Jane continued, "How can I avoid getting hooked?"

In my recent post Coping With Email Overload, I suggested that it's better...

Anyone who has sat in enough teleconferences has experienced a special kind of meeting hell. The discussion drifts and sags until, to try to get things back on track, the facilitator says, "John, what do you think about the proposed initiative?" Then, after an awkwardly long pause, John responds with: "Oh, sorry, what was the question again?"

Teleconferences can be a huge waste of time. But, when conducted properly, they can be both efficient and effective, even more so than face-to-...

Increasing productivity — making more with less — is at the core of any company or any economy's economic progress. From a societal view, productivity drives higher living standards and increases shared resources — for example, providing a government with more resources to invest back into its citizens. For a company, increasing productivity has the same result — increasing profitability that can either be used to increase the wealth of employees and shareholders or...

Tomorrow is my birthday — always an opportunity for reflection, but especially this time. For several weeks now, I've been thinking about what I've learned during the past six decades that really matters. Here's a first pass:

1. The more we know about ourselves, the more power we have to behave better. Humility is underrated. We each have an infinite capacity for self-deception — countless unconscious ways we protect ourselves from pain, uncertainty,...