Maintaining a focused state of mind can be quite challenging due to numerous distractions like smartphones, fatigue, and procrastination. Thankfully, neuroscientist Professor Andrew Huberman shares an easy brain hack to boost focus on essential tasks that matter the most in our lives. Let’s dive into the details!
The Role of Smartphones in Losing Focus
According to Andrew Huberman, smartphones have a detrimental effect on people’s ability to concentrate. When we use our phones, our brains are exposed to an overload of fast-paced visuals equivalent to watching multiple TV shows simultaneously. This constant exposure to information affects one’s sleep schedule and overall productivity. Moreover, the appeal of smartphones often exacerbates procrastination and prevents us from addressing important tasks promptly.
To reduce this negative impact, Huberman suggests physically distancing oneself from smartphones and spending a few minutes focusing solely on a stationary point on a wall. By practicing this simple mental exercise for 120 seconds, you’ll experience initial boredom and agitation but gradually train yourself to better focus on significant tasks. This technique enables you to recognize when distractions arise and help push through them effectively.
Staying Focused in Everyday Life
Incorporating Huberman’s brain hack into daily life can yield impressive results across various aspects – from studying and reading to attentive listening during conversations. With consistency, focus training can help identify triggers that cause procrastination or feelings of restlessness, allowing you to address them head-on. Ultimately, by learning how to circumvent common distractions, you develop greater mental control over your focus.
The principle of focus training can be extended beyond this simple method. Engaging in mindfulness exercises, such as meditation, can further improve your ability to concentrate. Additionally, setting specific goals with defined deadlines can create a sense of urgency, stimulating the need to maintain focus on a given task.
In the face of constant distractions, finding methods to remain focused is paramount. The brain hack shared by Professor Huberman offers a practical solution to enhancing focus and productivity. Consistently practicing this technique, along with incorporating supplementary approaches, such as meditation or goal-setting strategies, will lead to significant improvements in achieving desired outcomes while minimizing the impact of distractions in daily life.
Proton Mail Will Offer Message Scheduling, Email Categorization, and More
Proton, based in Switzerland, has hinted at some important upgrades for its core Proton Mail and calendar services. Although Proton has diversified over the years into VPNs and storage, encrypted email is still supreme and is possibly the most important aspect of its most recent disclosure.
Proton Mail’s New Features
Proton frequently promotes itself as Google’s antithesis, but at least in terms of privacy, the business has a busy roadmap for the next few months that will bring new features that are similar to those of Gmail.
Other upcoming upgrades that Proton will make include email reminders. They will allow users to set an alarm to remember to reply at a later time. They also added the ability to “snooze” emails.
Email Tracking, Focus on Privacy
Proton also disclosed that it would be introducing new tools that can be used to disable email tracking. This will make it impossible for businesses or individuals to determine when an email was opened and render the data useless. This is more in line with Proton’s focus on improving privacy.
Future updates won’t just affect Proton Mail. Nearly a year after it was launched on Android, the company is getting ready to release a native calendar app for the iPhone. Also, it will be releasing new three-day and seven-day views for the Proton calendar app.
Proton Drive Cloud Storage
With its Proton drive cloud storage just going into beta on the web, Proton is planning to roll out deeper synergies across its product range. They may include email attachments larger than the 25 MB limit for Proton mail which will be instantly uploaded to Proton drive and made accessible to the recipient via a secure link.
One Sign-In, Access to Multiple Services!
Proton also announced that it was bringing single sign-on (SSO) to mobile. This would allow users of Proton’s apps to access each service with only one sign-in. SSO is now only available through a web browser.
Proton isn’t yet revealing any particular dates for anything. However, it did indicate that Proton Mail’s email scheduling and email-tracking blocker, as well as the new iPhone calendar app and the three-day and seven-day calendar views, will be available within the next month.
Everything else will touch released throughout 2023, at various intervals.