Focus: A Dynamic Strategy for Greater Career Success

CareerCast - Life-long Career Development

Are you a multitasker? According to current scientific research, this could be decreasing your productivity, increasing your stress, and making it less likely that you will achieve the level of professional success you desire. In this CareerCast, award-winning author and journalist Maggie Jackson shares research, insights, and strategies from her latest book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, on how you can rekindle your powers of focus in a world of speed and overload.

Aired August 20, 2009

Biography

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her penetrating coverage of US social issues. She writes the popular “Balancing Acts” column in the Sunday Boston Globe, and her work has also appeared in the New York Times, in Gastronomica, and on National Public Radio.

Her latest book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, details the steep costs of our current epidemic deficits of attention, while revealing the astonishing scientific discoveries that can help us rekindle our powers of focus in a world of speed and overload.

Her acclaimed first book, What’s Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age, examined the loss of home as a refuge.

A former foreign correspondent for the Associated Press in Tokyo and London, Jackson has won numerous awards for her coverage of work-life issues, including the Media Award from the Work-Life Council of the Conference Board.

In 2005–2006, she was a journalism fellow in child and family policy at the University of Maryland. A graduate of Yale University and the London School of Economics with highest honors, she lives in New York City with her family.

Related Resources

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen (2002).

Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life by David Allen (2004).

How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1998).

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey (2004).

The Power of Focus: What the World’s Greatest Achievers Know about the Secret of Financial Freedom and Success by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, and Les Hewitt (2000).

Focus Like a Laser Beam: 10 Ways to Do What Matters Most by Lisa L. Haneberg and Keith Ferrazzi (2006).

The Power of Focus for Women: How to Live the Life You Really Want by Fran Hewitt and Les Hewitt (2003).

Find Your Focus Zone: An Effective New Plan to Defeat Distraction and Overload by Lucy Jo Palladino (2007).

The Practicing Mind: Bringing Discipline and Focus into Your Life by Thomas M. Sterner (2006).

Read an excerpt of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson.

Read the Excerpt

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Focus: A Dynamic Strategy for Greater Career Success

Biography

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