Vertical blinds can help concentration

Tony Schwartz, president of the Energy Project and author of "The Way We're Working Isn't Working," recently wrote about the American addiction to e-mail on The Huffington Post.

An informal poll that Schwartz conducted found that 60 percent of the respondents claimed that they spend less than "two waking hours a day... disconnected from e-mail."

He compares this phenomenon to the late 1960s marshmallow experiment, where only 30 percent of children were capable of waiting fifteen minutes to eat a marshmallow placed in front of them. The other 70 percent, he writes, were "low delayers," who could only stare at the marshmallow and had extreme difficulty adjusting their focus.

The trick to prying yourself from e-mail, Schwartz suggests, is to "strategically train our attention" somewhere else. When leaving the Blackberry, laptop, and iPhone somewhere else, try to sit down with no distractions.

Of course, to seal distractions from an area you need something that can act as a partition. Vertical blinds can be the ideal barrier in crowded houses, especially if you want to divide one room from the rest of the busy house. They fit perfectly on sliding glass doors leading to the porch or glass doors leading to living rooms and offices.