The Distraction-Free Professional

Julie Gaspar is a productivity researcher, corporate trainer, and the founder of Focus First Consulting, a firm dedicated to helping organizations build cultures of deep work. Over the past fifteen years, she has worked with more than two hundred companies — ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 enterprises — to redesign workflows, communication norms, and physical environments for sustained concentration and meaningful output.

Julie's interest in focus and productivity began during her tenure as a software engineer at a major technology company, where she observed firsthand how the open-office environment, constant messaging, and culture of immediate responsiveness systematically undermined the very deep thinking that the company claimed to value. Frustrated by the gap between what the research said about focus and what her workplace actually encouraged, she began experimenting with the techniques that would eventually form the Distraction-Free Professional system.

She left her engineering role to pursue graduate study in cognitive psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where her research focused on attention management and the environmental factors that support sustained concentration. Her thesis, which examined the relationship between workplace interruption patterns and knowledge worker output, was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology and has been cited in more than three hundred subsequent studies.

After completing her graduate work, Julie spent five years as a senior consultant at a leading organizational design firm before founding Focus First Consulting. Her corporate training programs have been adopted by companies including Microsoft, Salesforce, and Atlassian, and her workshops on deep work have been delivered to audiences on six continents.

Julie is also the author of *The Attention Economy: How Technology Shapes What We Notice and What We Miss*, a critically acclaimed examination of the psychological and societal impacts of attention-manipulating technology. She is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Psychology Today, where her articles on focus, productivity, and workplace design reach millions of readers each year.

She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner and their two children, where she practices what she preaches: protecting three hours of deep work every morning before transitioning to reactive work and family time in the afternoon. When not writing or consulting, she is an avid long-distance runner and a volunteer mentor for women entering technology careers through the organization Girls Who Code.