Today in Techrights

• A Month After One OSI Co-Founder Resigns in the Mailing Lists Over OSI’s Attacks on Software Freedom the Other OSI Co-Founder Gets Kicked Out for Speaking About It
• The Linux Foundation is Deeply Committed to Diversity and Inclusiveness (as Long as You Have Perfect Vision and Use ‘Big Browsers’ That Spy)
• Inside the Free Software Foundation (FSF) – Part I: Year Zero
• Reminder: At Linux Foundation in 2020 Three Board Members, Including the Vice Chair and Director at Large, Are Current or Past Microsoft Employees
• Alexandre Oliva on Diversity Hypocrites
• FSF’s Interim Co-President Alexandre Oliva on FSF Communication Policies
• Alexandre Oliva: Courage is Contagious
• IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, February 25, 2020
• IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, February 26, 2020
• Links 27/2/2020: LibreOffice 6.4.1, Collabora Office for Phones and Latte Dock 0.9.9
• Links 26/2/2020: Cosmo Communicator 2-in-1, FSF Outlines Plans for Code Hosting
• Links 25/2/2020: MakuluLinux LinDoz and Manjaro 19.0 Released

Regain your focus: Manage your push notifications in Linux

I have been working in a professional IT environment of a large organization for over 20 years and during that time I have seen a lot of different visions and opinions on individual and collective productivity. What I have noticed in all those years is how many people think that you are a bad-ass professional if you can do an insane amount of tasks simultaneously. But let’s be honest, doing many things at the same time is not the same as doing things right. But gradually, cracks start to appear in the common opinion that it is always good to multitask. More and more studies show that multitasking undermines focus. And focus is necessary to not waste valuable time due to finding back your concentration as a result of an attention switch. Focus makes sure that you can deliver some high-quality results instead of just many, but probably mediocre results. In this article I want to delve deeper into the backgrounds behind focus, productivity, the impact of notifications on your productivity, and the things that you should consider in allowing and managing your push notifications under Linux. [...] In the introduction I already indicated that nowadays we are increasingly questioning the importance of being good at multitasking, and that perhaps single-tasking is much better. There is, however, a nuance, since multitasking can be fine in itself, as long as all the tasks you want to perform don’t require an equal amount of brain activity and attention. For example, if you like to listen to music during your study time, it is better to listen to instrumental music instead of music in which lyrics play the leading role. With spoken text, you unconsciously interpret and shift your attention from your main task to the music, so you constantly need to refocus back again to your main task. But if you still want to listen to music with vocals, then it is advisable to only listen to music that you have known for years instead of listening to songs with song texts that you have never heard before. New texts subconsciously require more of your attention than texts that you have already known for years. Multitasking is therefore only great when it comes to a combination of simple activities alongside your main task, such as making simple sketches, creating doodles, playing with an elastic band, or chewing your pencil, during a colleague’s presentation or while reading an advice report or listening to a teacher. These doodles and fiddling with a piece of rubber do not require brain effort, so you can keep all your real focus on the main task. But constantly looking at your messages on your mobile phone while listening to a presentation of your colleague, will lead to a loss of focus and loss of information, and of course this is not the nicest and most respectful thing to do in front of a presenting colleague.

Android Leftovers

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• How to Get Your Android Phone Working As Seamlessly with Windows as iPhones Work with Macs

• The best Android multiplayer games in 2020

• Top 10 Best Android Shooter Games – February 2020

• ‘Cards & Passes’ widely rolling out to Pixel phones running Android 11

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