Music and Productivity

Can music really increase focus and in turn productivity? While working on web development or concentrating on that project with a quickly approaching deadline, you could be listening to music from Focus at Will. It is a new streaming music service that can more than triple a listener's attention span while studying or working under deadlines. But it's no ordinary collection of tracks. Each composition is designed to keep the brain engaged past the point of around 20 minutes, when people's minds begin to wander. You might be wondering what it is that makes your mind wander. It is the limbic system that constantly wants to interrupt you because it is looking for food or danger. By playing music that soothes this part of the brain, people can focus on a task for as long as 100 minutes, according to Henshall's research, conducted by Bowker market research and the psychology department at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Computers Were Just the Beginning

Do you remember when the 1983 Time issue came out naming the PC as the Machine of the year? Of course you do, or you would not be traipsing around the internet reading these posts while you have a whole slew of CMS development projects to get done. Anywho, while you are here, I might as well entertain the notion that you are interested in what I have to say about the PC revolution that got part of its fuel from the Time article. In retrospect, what the 21-page Machine of the Year cover package captures isn’t the beginning of the PC so much as the end of the beginning. The industry still had room for a bevy of hobbyist-oriented, sometimes downright rudimentary computers from Apple, Atari, Commodore, Osborne, Radio Shack, Texas Instruments, Timex and others. None of them had futuristic features like a graphical user interface and a mouse; most ran their own operating systems and weren’t compatible with anything else on the market.

Happy New Year!

As we move into a new year, there are lots of resolutions made as well as reflections about the past year. To make sure that the coming year is a great one, there are a couple things that you could do. First of all slow down and take some notice of the world around you. Pick three good things that you see or experience during the day, then write them down. Then do not forget to say thank you. Connecting with others this way will help you get outside of your own head. When you are working as part of a team, such as on web development or application development, it is also important to notice what you have work together with each others strengths. AB Soft has some of the best teams in the software development market and the office is extremely comfortable to work in. They have plenty of openings to look into.