I’ve been enjoying Daniel Pink’s travel tips series, but one bit from tip number 7 about how to zip through airport security really spoke to me. I’m both ashamed and proud to see myself here:
Men are crazy. We are hyper-competitive. So, every opportunity we have to best someone else, we will take it. What this [...]
I love planning and organizing things so much that sometimes I’d rather not ever do the actual thing.
(This is actually a running theme in my life. See also: song database but no new recordings, exercise plan but no new muscles. The only time it works in my favor is when having a plan inherently leads [...]
The 14-Second Work Year. Parody may not be timeless, but it can be very satisfying.
Maybe a bit of an alpha-male slant here.
Ernest Hemingway
Donald Rumsfeld “I like to use a chainsaw and cut wood and chop wood.”
Thomas Jefferson
Winston Churchill
Thomas Wolfe
Vladimir Nabokov
John Dos Passos
John Adams
Douglas MacArthur
Virginia Woolf
Leonardo Da Vinci
Benjamin Franklin
Napoleon Bonaparte
William Gladstone
A long essay on why crunch mode doesn’t work. The gist is that productivity peaks within the first 4, 5, or 6 hours of the day, then starts dropping. Eventually it dissolves completely. In the long run, that continuous overtime isn’t helping you or your company.
I learned about Parkinson’s Law while twittering today: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Here are some other eponymous laws.
It’s amazing what a 9k text file will do for your peace of mind. I finally got around to making a list of Projects like I’ve been meaning to. While I’m nearly religious about keeping a task list, I’ve never bothered to capture those multi-step projects in one place. What bothers me is why I [...]
Scott Underwood and Merlin Mann talk about productivity stuff. I’m not really a huge fan of instant messaging in the workplace, so I enjoyed this brief exchange:
Scott: IM to me combines the worst aspects of the telephone and e-mail—
Merlin:—and being a teenager.
Good book. I posted a while ago about my initial doubts and then how excited I became about this book as I began to read it. It all turned out fairly well, though I think the glow is gone.
Despite the hokey title, 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich seems to [...]
A graphic exploring the connected approaches of the Specialist and the Generalist. [via michael surtees]
I just started reading The 4-Hour Work Week. I admit, in the beginning, I didn’t want to like it. Part of me wanted Tim Ferriss to be some shallow, cocky blowhard with a couple hundred pages of motivational fluff. But… he won me over by page 11 with a passing reference to J.B. Say, and [...]
A video of Merlin Mann talking to Google employees about Inbox Zero, e-mail management philosophy and technique. “Before you get good, you have to stop sucking.” For the past two weeks, I’ve gone to bed with an empty inbox. It feels great. And now that I’ve got a good Seinfeld streak going (thx, Austin), I [...]
Recent Flickr groups I like: Tea Sketches is tea stains + illustration, and Items We Carry is what people bring along in their pockets. Here’s what I carry.
Mark Hurst just published a book to get you back on track: Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload. Could be a good one.
If you cut up a large diamond into little bits, it will entirely lose the value it had as a whole; and an army divided up into small bodies of soldiers, loses all its strength. So a great intellect sinks to the level of an ordinary one, as soon as it is interrupted and disturbed, [...]
Mike Davidson has a simple solution to spend less time dealing with e-mail overload: “Every e-mail I send to anyone, regardless of subject or recipient, will be five sentences or less.”
Francis Tapon is going to attempt to yo-yo the Continental Divide Trail—2800 miles north and 2800 miles back south through New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. I think it’s pretty amazing to even consider it, but it seems like the next “logical” step since the AT and PCT have been yo-yo’ed. I’ll be keeping tabs [...]
A nice roundup of 77 tips to amp your learning. Lots of good links there.
Wayne Gerdes can get 59 miles per gallon of gas out of a 2005 Honda Accord… and he’s recorded 181mpg in a Honda Insight.
Merlin Mann is starting a little video show. Widescreen, to boot. I hope they’re all that way—GTD is all about peripheral vision.
Fans of the Hipster PDA will hail the introduction of the Hipster Shuffle. I love the Apple Dancing. [via 43 Folders]
Rebecca Blood points to a massive New Year’s resolution-keeping experiment and a news article about the whole thing. The idea is that you sign up, tell them the resolution, then the psychologists/automated mailing system will pester you via e-mail to see how you’re coming along. All the data-gathering will help scholars figure out how humanity [...]
I’m always looking for a new perspective on GTD. I thought David Seah’s review of Getting Things Done was quite good.
New York Times article on the trend of embracing entropy:
Mess is complete, in that it embraces all sorts of random elements. Mess tells a story: you can learn a lot about people from their detritus, whereas neat — well, neat is a closed book. Neat has no narrative and no personality (as any cover of [...]
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