Tools for Thought

This week I’ll be finishing up the Pattern Language for Productivity series, making some non-trivial edits to it, and turning it into a PDF for download. I’ll leave the series on the blog as-is — I wouldn’t want to edit it retroactively — so you’ll definitely want to take a look at the e-book version, which will essentially be a “second edition.”

I’ll keep writing about productivity, but it’s always been my intention for the blog to move beyond cranking more widgets, so expect to see more diversity this month. In that spirit, let’s see what else was going on out there this week.

Alltop’s Lifehacks page. Tools for Thought has been selected for inclusion into Guy Kawasaki’s new blog aggregator. Alltop consists of single pages for the top blog categories, and each page has links to the top 40 blogs in each respective category, with links to each blog’s last four posts. The pages are updated ever 10 minutes, so it’s a great way to stay current without collecting feeds. It’s also great for discovering similar blogs. (Alltop)

Cuckoo, cuckoo. Nicholas Carr’s hilarious lancing of the Gaia-like “global consciousness” meme that’s been a staple of internet discourse since the open-sourcing the World Wide Web 15 years ago. “Define consciousness downward sufficiently and — cuckoo! — a global one emerges.” (Rough Type)

70 Simple Power Tao Secret Hacks to Writing the Perfect Productivity Article, Plus a Guide & System for Doing It. Clay Collins must channeling Terry Southern. This article is even funnier than Carr’s. The hacks are all here: write numbered lists (or “Don’t use transitions”), quote an eastern mystic, add a serene picture. And to think that I’d almost forgiven myself for writing a list article: Six Critical Information Resources for Your Cell Phone. (The Growing Life)

Three Ways to Mitigate Attention Crash, Yet Still Feel Informed. This looks like a losing battle to me: the attempt to fill every interstice of idle time with more information. Before pursuing the attempt to feel informed, it’s important to ask, “At what point will I feel informed?” What is enough information? Is it healthy to look at all windows of time in terms of their perceived lost opportunity cost? Definitely worth further consideration. (Micropersuasion)

Why Your Mental RAM Can Cut It. An interpretation of a passage in my Pattern Language entry on the Weekly Review. My use of “mental RAM” was a little more metaphorical than how it was portrayed (positively) here, but I’m enough of a geek to enjoy having a “four-bit brain.” (Team Taskmaster)