Tools for Thought

A key concept in the Getting Things Done method is maintaining a strict separation between actionable and non-actionable items. “Anytime you blend actionable and non-actionable things into one area,” David Allen notes in his Getting Things Done…Fast seminar recordings, “you go numb to the area.” This is why GTD refers to “Next Action” lists rather […]

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Last week, just to amuse myself, and to squeeze in more writing time, I decided to speed up my morning routine by giving myself no more than 30 minutes from the moment I woke up to complete my entire grooming before heading out the door.
To accomplish this, I had to do things differently. I started […]

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David Lynch has haunted me for years. Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive are two of my favorite films. Where most filmmakers succeed or fail on their strength as narrators, Lynch’s films are streams of rich archetypes that transcend the usual demand for beginning, middle and end. A single frame may have more emotional impact than an […]

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Distributed cognition lies at the heart of many creativity and productivity systems. It’s basically a fancy term for a two-step process:

Collecting thoughts
Organizing them

Collecting thoughts means externalizing them in some way, usually onto paper or computer. Once we get them out of the mind’s short-term memory, we create space, “mental RAM,” to have further thoughts more […]

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