Tools for Thought

There’s a problem with the common advice to focus on priorities. Something is always a priority relative to something else. If you had nothing else to do in the world but one task, you wouldn’t need to “focus” on it as a priority; the action would be self-evident, as it is in life-threatening emergencies. As [...]

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We’ve all read studies, usually from print media, about the dangers of email, instant messaging, web surfing and social networking platforms on productivity. Whether the impact is measured in hours or dollars, it’s almost always assumed that there’s no countervailing gain from the time these tools can save compared to face-to-face meetings and phone calls. [...]

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We usually think of clutter as something physical. But clutter is anything that obstructs you from moving forward. Clutter can be stuff that prevents you from walking across the room without tripping, but it can also be behaviors that fill up lots of time, preventing you from making progress in more meaningful areas of your [...]

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As consumers, we like to think of ourselves as rational actors. Free market theory is predicated on this assumption. Supply side errors should be corrected in the marketplace as consumers vote against poor exchange values with their wallets. But is this true? Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational takes a contrarian view, using the prism of Behavioral [...]

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At least a few GTD best practices don’t comport with the usual advice given in time management literature. GTD doesn’t assign priority codes to action list items. To do lists are split into several smaller lists, typically organized by physical context. Potential, uncommitted projects are tracked on their own list (Someday/Maybe) rather than dispensed with [...]

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Many decisions we make during the day are easy. What do I want for dinner? Should I get gas now or later? What’s the best route to get to my destination? Easy decisions typically involve a very finite number of variables, low enough to manage them in our heads. The moment we have to compare, [...]

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By now, the economic arc of civilization is a story we’ve all heard in its capsule description many times: we’ve gone from the Agricultural Age, to the Industrial Age, to the Information Age. Daniel Pink’s influential A Whole New Mind attempts to sketch out the contours era that follows. Pink outlines the values, skills and [...]

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I’m surprised by how many people still don’t “get” text messaging, at least among adults in the US. This week the New York Times ran an article noting the low percentage of US cell phone owners that use text messaging. Despite most of the article being about email usage on cell phones in South Korea [...]

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Organizing tools and systems have allowed people to take on more obligations and projects without the old concern of losing track of things. In the physical realm, an entire industry of container stores and professional organizers have emerged to bring our possessions under control. We’re only beginning to acknowledge the surfeit of information, obligations and [...]

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We lack a language to express the full depth of what’s encompassed by “work.” Work is more than activity, more than the validation that accompanies checking a completed task off a list. Authentic work fulfills some agreement we’ve made with ourselves and others. Projects and actions are unresolved agreements, “open loops” that create some degree [...]

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