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Two speakers at the SxSW interactive conference in Austin  Guber& Schwartz)  were talking about being sustainably productive by balancing periods of fully absorbed attention with intermittent renewal.
Peering out into the vast “Texan” hall, they feared  the future: a sea of the digital elite hunched over blinking technologies, tweeting and texting as  they talked.
Here’s what some of them were saying, all in 140 characters or less:
“I’m splitting my attention between @guber & tweeting that 2 B gr8 U have to be willing to suffer/practice.”
” Schwartz tells SXSW attendees to go to bed earlier. Tough sell.”
“How can Schwartz stay sane giving a speech on focusing on task at a time while the audience is on their iPads/iPhones at same time?”
I wasn’t so worried about my own sanity — I was only doing one thing at a time, after all — but I was a little concerned about theirs. We’ve truly entered a world of nonstop input and output.
What exactly will it take to seize back control of our lives? We need a series of deliberate practices to counter the powerful forces accelerating our lives.  I’m interested in this, because my recent query has been “To blog or not to blog?”.  By blogging, am I just giving people more things to read in their busy lives, or am I giving them something to think about? Am I building awareness or wasting my time? 
Imagine for a moment that you’re downsizing from a house to an apartment one-third the size. Everything you have seems necessary until you realize it simply won’t fit in your new place.
There’s always room for less.
You likely already have too much to do, too much information to absorb, and too many choices to make. If so, your challenge is learning to say no far more often — “no” to more projects, more meetings, more emails, more tweets, more Facebook updates, more purchases, more friends, more “likes”, and more fans and followers.
Prioritization isn’t just what you want to do, it’s increasingly what you ought not do. What can you delegate and eliminate, take off your plate or put on the back burner in each dimension of your life?
If you’re going to take on something new, what are you going to stop doing? How are you going to be more ruthlessly selective?
 If you know me, you know I study Latin & Greek.  Curate comes from the Latin curare, meaning “to care” — in this case for yourself. Think of this as a Not To Do list.
 Create more space in your brain — and your life.
Be aware. Be amazed. Be conscious. You don’t need “new”, you need to be aware of, and amazed at, what you do have.
We also need to create more space in our days. To make sense of our increasingly complex and demanding world, we need times during the day when we step back, reflect on and metabolize what we’ve just taken in.  Come to the farm, see things that are “growing”, “flowering”, “being”, or I should say “Beeing”!  When you leave your house, do you “see” the flowers in your garden, are you “amazed” at them? 
We need less data and more context, less volume and more depth. That can’t happen if we’re running from one meeting to the next, and emailing, texting and tweeting in every moment in between. Where can you insert purposeful pauses?
Do one thing at a time as much as possible.
Human beings aren’t designed to do two cognitive tasks at the same time. We’re  more efficient when we do activities sequentially rather than simultaneously. We also do higher quality work when we’re singly focused, “Focusing on Crocusing”!!
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