Tools for Thought

The Pareto Principle — the concept that 20% of what contributes to an outcome accounts for 80% of that outcome — can be easily misunderstood on a few grounds. The ratio can vary. 10% of a collector’s paintings might account for 90% of the collection’s value. 50% of a meal might alleviate 100% of a [...]

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I normally don’t suggest things I haven’t tried for long, but I’m too encouraged by the results to let this pass without comment. A few days ago I had lunch at Phillippe in downtown Los Angeles (the best sandwich shop in God’s country). Whenever I eat there, my self-discipline invariably goes out the window, and [...]

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Just as most of us are better at talking than listening, most personal development discourse is more adept at setting goals than finding them. They advocate building your motivation to achieve a goal over questioning the motivation behind that goal. There’s no dialectic for asking if we really want what we want. The rhetoric of [...]

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One of the most controversial principles of Getting Things Done is what David Allen refers to as “hard landscape.” Hard landscape is the practice of restricting your calendar to externally committed tasks: meetings, appointments, events — anything with a time or date dependency. The converse of this practice is the controversial part: don’t put anything [...]

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For over a week I’ve been testing the limits of working offline, with a goal connecting no more than one hour per day. This experiment in renunciation conceptually overlaps with Tim Ferriss’ Low Information Diet, but for the time being I’m only concerned with reducing my connectivity, not necessarily my intake of information. Even still, [...]

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“I think there’s sort of a linguistic thing going on.” Hearing the above remark by Clay Collins in a talk with Duff McDuffee about the limits of the word “productivity,” a frustration I’ve harbored for weeks suddenly uncoiled. I’m over productivity. It’s outlived its usefulness as a focal point and framework for meaningful discussion. Through [...]

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Sometimes when we need to work on a project, we don’t have the resource we need. If I need to access the internet to do some research, and I’m not at a computer, I don’t worry about it since the next action isn’t currently actionable. Not usually. But it can still be worthwhile to question [...]

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In any situation, certain givens define the range of how we perceive it. By expanding the scope of considerations with a conscious effort, we can increase the span of our attention to aspects that might have otherwise been missed. Consider All Factors (CAF) is an attention directing tool designed to do this. During a defined [...]

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Last week, I switched to a paper organizer to manage my calendar and action lists, and found that I got nearly twice as much done as usual. During that week, a couple of computer problems converged to prevent me from using my laptop for writing, forcing me to work around the issue by writing exclusively [...]

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Anyone who’s been reading Tools for Thought on a regular basis has certainly picked up on the theme that managing attention and focus matters far more to me than managing time. While at the library a couple of days ago I allowed my attention to wander to a shelf with Sam Horn’s ConZentrate. So I [...]

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