Tools for Thought

Any labor-saving technology offers two potentials, depending on the mindset of the user:

Reducing the amount of time needed to achieve a desired output
Increasing the amount of output within the previously required length of time

Since the average employed American works a 46-hour workweek, with 38 percent claiming to work more than 50 hours per week — [...]

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For the last few months, mainly to challenge my thinking, I’ve been reading material on “the cloud” to understand the appeal of web-based applications and supply-side computing. Much of what I’ve seen seemed like a solution in search of a problem, considering that I’ve been running apps of my hard drive since the Mac SE [...]

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GTD is more of an internal, cognitive process of clarification than a regimen of making lists to create gratuitous obligations. If an action list doesn’t accurately reflect the user’s intentionality, it needs to be pared down or built up until it does. If the written list is incomplete, some potentially important items are left in [...]

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(Play Video)
Most people who think they lack ideas might very well have the opposite problem. They may have so many ideas that they obscure each other. It’s not a problem of having ideas, but of seeing them. Once they’re visible, it becomes easier to see their relationships to each other, prioritize them if necessary, identify [...]

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There’s a reason why so many books and blog posts warn readers about the dangers of checking email, but they usually reach the right conclusions for the wrong reasons. Instead of recommending that you never check email in the morning, or to avoid checking email between scheduled intervals, I have a better suggestion.
Never check email. [...]

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I’ve written several times in passing about inherent flaws in what’s usually called “time management,” particularly about the central assumption that controlling time is synonymous with increasing productivity. The time-and-motion model of productivity is an Industrial Age artifact that springs from the need for lockstep coordination of tasks on the assembly line. When cranking widgets [...]

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For GTD users, the weekly review can be one of the hardest challenges to maintain. The general concept behind the weekly review is to batch the thinking about your entire workload during the week into a single short session, usually one to two hours, and periodically include more long-range planning.
The goal of the weekly review [...]

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From the film Roger Dodger:
Nick: Like, what do you do all day?
Roger: What do I do all day? I sit here and think of ways to make people feel bad.
Nick: I thought you wrote commercials.
Roger: I do. But you can’t sell a product without first making people feel bad.
Nick: Why not?
Roger: Because it’s a substitution [...]

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Check out the follow-up to Part 1 of my recent interview with Julie Morgenstern, best know as the personal organizing and time management expert to wrote Organizing from the Inside Out and Time Management from the Inside Out. With her new book, which I reviewed last month, When Organizing Isn’t Enough, Julie moves beyond simply [...]

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After I reviewed Julie Morgenstern’s instant decluttering classic, When Organizing Isn’t Enough, the publisher was kind enough to arrange an interview for me with the guru of personal organizing.
Julie’s best known work, Organizing from the Inside Out, focused on finding better homes for the stuff in our lives, making it more accessible. When Organizing Isn’t [...]

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