Tools for Thought

A common problem with task management systems is the length of time that entries remain unexamined. Action lists contain items that no longer reflect current reality. Things that seemed like good ideas at the time they were written down are no longer priorities, no longer practical, or simply no longer interesting.
Hard landscape items on calendars […]

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Sometimes procrastination stems from anxiety over the unknown. I lost hours yesterday in trying to adopt Google Documents for my article writing. A simple product review turned into an all-day affair. It took me most of the day to pinpoint the source of my procrastination; then it became obvious that I was splitting my attention […]

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When we’re undecided on whether or not to commit to a project, one option is to shelve the project on a Someday/Maybe list. But sometimes indecision stems from insufficient information. We need to get enough data to make sure that deciding not to do something is a proactive choice, made from reason or informed intuition, […]

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Freeware Windows app Free Music Zilla was designed to catch music streaming through sites like Last.fm and Pandora in your Downloads folder. Though unpublicized, the function works equally well for Flash videos like those found on YouTube.
Launch Free Music Zilla prior to playing the video you want to save. By default, FMZ will show the […]

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The flip side of managing commitments is managing options. There’s a subtle but fundamental difference between choosing not to act on an option and not choosing to act on it. The former is proactive triage, the latter is indecision. Some things are not worth doing now, but possibly later. Some things, though interesting, are not […]

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I’ve added a new section for updates from microborg Twitter in the sidebar. Yes, resistance is futile. If you’re interested, click on its heading to follow me, or just click here.
And now for a few favorite dispatches from elsewhere in the blogosphere this week.
Simple Manifesto: Break Free from the Tyranny of the Clock. A different […]

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To bring a project to closure, we need not only to keep track of our own actions, but those of others. Legacy To Do lists are not designed to track external dependencies. We need a language to identify all components of a project, not just the proactive.
Whenever a project requires information or a delegated action […]

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Gina Trapani (along with co-editor Adam Pash) of Lifehacker has been profound influence on my workflow since the blog’s inception in 2005. Launched about a year after Danny O’Brien codified the “life hack” concept based on geeks’ propensity for process optimization, Lifehacker has been an unending stream of tips […]

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Repetitive tasks are usually not high-priority ones, but they still need to be done. The fact that they need to be done doesn’t mean they need to be done the moment they have your attention. Let them accumulate, handling them at optimally infrequent intervals, between which you spend the bulk of your time focusing on […]

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Action is experiential. The more we experience doing, the less effort we realize it takes. The more we imagine doing, the more effort it appears to take. We need a way to externalize our thinking, a tool to bypass our mental process. Fortunately, there’s a time-tested way to jump start any daunting task:
Set a timer […]

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