Tools for Thought

If you’re experiencing an action block, one of the best ways to get around it is to use a timer. Set it for a 15-minute interval, during which time you work completely without interruption. No email, no phone calls, no web surfing; just work exclusively on the assigned task. When the timer goes off, count [...]

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One small but non-trivial way to cultivate a clear mind when working at a computer is to cultivate a clear desktop. Deleting a program icon from the desktop doesn’t delete the program itself, with rare exceptions. A Windows dialog prompting you to proceed with icon deletion will confirm this prior to execution. If you’ve installed [...]

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Like work, information has its own Parkinson’s Law. As one example, Google Reader will fill whatever time we have available. Without a strategic approach to processing RSS feeds, the tendency is to keep adding new feeds until we stop just short of overwhelm. This “Thanksgiving dinner” method of managing information intake is not sustaintable. Notice [...]

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Yesterday, The Simple Dollar posted a great review of Predictably Irrational, a book that covers mental accounting and behavioral economics. One chapter he discussed, “The Cost of Zero Cost,” intrigued me because I happened to be in a situation that indirectly underscored the principle. I was about to have a second cup of coffee in [...]

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As the public fascination with productivity keeps increasing, the backlash against it grows in proportion. The continual focus with getting more done in a day is suspect. Is it even a healthy or worthwhile endeavor? It depends on what people mean by “more,” and how productivity and accomplishment are measured. A to-do list with many [...]

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Flowscaping is a cognitive mapping technique pioneered by Edward de Bono in the 1990s that never caught on the way some of his trademark techniques and concepts have (Six Thinking Hats, the term “Lateral Thinking”). A flowscape is designed to give the thinker a topographical view of his or her stream of consciousness around an [...]

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As I mentioned in my last post, The Zen of Q10, I just scored a cheap AlphaSmart 3000 word processor on eBay. It came Saturday afternoon, and due to a tight schedule I hadn’t planned to use it much. I had “real” writing to do, and didn’t think I could take on the learning curve [...]

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Constraints are more reliable than discipline. Rather than count on exemplary self-control, I try to structure my environment to make unproductive activities inconvenient to do. As part of my experiment with more filtered approaches to writing, a couple of days ago, I snagged an AlphaSmart 3000 word processor on the cheap from eBay. The 3000 [...]

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Some of the best project management and workflow books come from the software industry. Programmers are an analytical bunch by nature, and most of their analyses port quite easily to other domains. Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency takes the themes Tom DeMarco covered in his most well-known book, Peopleware, [...]

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Cell phones can make more elegant information appliances than laptops. Their diminutive interfaces force them, and their owners, to filter out noncritical data. Here are six degrees of information to make your cell phone’s information bottleneck work in your favor. Your email client Escape the inbox without worrying about missing that critical email from the [...]

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