The Four Quadrants of Attention Management for Productivity

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:

• How multi-tasking and reactivity drain productivity
• Why skills you used before you turned 20 don’t work for your maturing brain
• Which attention management skills can solve your time management problems
• How mindfulness can help
• A discussion of the book Attention Management

Today’s book is: Attention Management: How to Create Success and Gain Productivity Every Day, by Maura Thomas. In a short, color-coded book designed to be read in an hour, Thomas succinctly outlines why Attention Management is the most essential skill you need to live a life of choice rather than a life of reaction and distraction. Offering readers a collection of new behaviors, including focus, mindfulness, control, presence, flow, and practical skills that will support your success, Maura Nevel Thomas shows you how to master attention management with strategies that make an immediate impact.

Our guest is: Maura Nevel Thomas, an award-winning international speaker and trainer on individual and corporate productivity and work-life balance, and the most widely-cited authority on attention management. Her proprietary Empowered Productivity™ System has been embraced by the likes of the U.S. Army, L’Oreal, and Dell. She is a TEDx Speaker, founder of Regain Your Time, author of five books, and was named a Top Leadership Speaker in Inc. Magazine. Maura is frequently featured in major business outlets including Business Insider, Fast Company, and Huffington Post, and she’s also a regular contributor to both Forbes and the Harvard Business Review, with articles there viewed over a million times. Follow her on Twitter @mnthomas.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator and co-producer of the Academic Life. She is a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:

• Information about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing and Underliving by Celeste Headlee
• Better Daily Mindfulness Habits: Simple Changes with Lifelong Impact by Kristen Manieri
• · From To-Do to Done: How to Go from Busy to Productive by Mastering to Your To-Do List by Maura Thomas
• This Maura Thomas article on attention
• The Maura Thomas webpage on Flow https://maurathomas.com/flow/
• This discussion of meditation

You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.

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