Tools for Thought

When a general reference filing system is used methodically for any length of time, a cluttered desk is unthinkable. Neatness is simply a residual effect of organization. Without having appropriate placeholders to retrieve things on demand, neatness becomes a goal in itself.
A clean desk can be a messy desk if “clean” means submerging mess beneath [...]

[Read more →]

Whenever my former boss would lay down some new policy for customers or employees, there would inevitably be some degree of blowback. Any change, from moving to a foreign country to moving furniture within a living room, disrupts our sphere of comfort.
Since I couldn’t get away with simply saying, “Well, that’s different from what I’m [...]

[Read more →]

A couple of years ago I tried to pull myself away from the PIM-and-PDA approach to tracking projects and actions. I bought the requisite ruled Moleskine and eagerly transferred my lists and calendar, formatting the latter by hand. The experiment failed.
The failure had to do with my work-school situation. I was working 50 hours a [...]

[Read more →]

Frogs can’t recognize dead flies as food. They only eat flies that are either walking or in flight, since a frog’s vision only keys on motion. Most office cultures have the same blindness to work transpiring in plain sight. Managers are unable to recognize the difference between thrashing and threshing, compelling workers to indulge in [...]

[Read more →]

There’s no going back in time, but there are ways to learn from the past rather than live in it.
Every day we walk through a minefield of potential distractions, sometimes arriving on the other side unscathed, sometimes not. One digression leads to another, the cycle repeats, and hours later we wonder where the time went. [...]

[Read more →]

Last week I wrote about my recent experiences using the spaced repetition flashcard applications Mnemosyne. It’s now the only program I use for learning whatever material I want to maintain long term, but for almost a decade, my main tool for spaced repetition was SuperMemo for Palm OS, which was one of the first applications [...]

[Read more →]

I’m taking the day off from blogging to pop under the hood of Wordpress for a tune-up. In the meantime, please check out the guest post I wrote last week, Where Your Eyes Go Your Attention Flows, at Francis Wade’s excellent time management blog, 2Time-Sys.com.Technorati Tags: Productivity

Share this post:

[Read more →]

Making a list of next actions can be motivating, but then there’s the reality test. When it comes time to decide what to do next, every option on the list may look as unappealing as the others. While it’s unrealistic to assume that every task we need to do will be something we just can’t [...]

[Read more →]