Tools for Thought

Not everyone needs a structured task management system. If you live on a farm or a monastery, you’re probably familiar enough with your daily routine, can be reasonably certain that it’s not likely to change, and don’t expect many interruptions to take you off course. For the rest of us, it helps to have at [...]

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The word “po” is a term coined by Edward de Bono in the sixties as a grammatical shorthand for a number of alternative thinking operations. The word has no magic powers in itself, but once you’re accustomed to using the operations it’s meant to invoke, their usage is less cumbersome, just as converting mathematical word [...]

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It’s been said that in theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is. So I always like to personally test out different ways of working rather than assume that something will or won’t work, especially if I think it won’t. One of my last experiments was switching from the Palm [...]

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Lawrence of Arabia: I was thinking. Ali: You were drifting. Lawrence: Yes. It will not happen again. Ali: Be warned! You were drifting. Lawrence: It will not happen again! Most office workers don’t have T.E. Lawrence’s problem. On the contrary, the main problem with working in an office is managing and minimizing the interruptions that [...]

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One important faculty worth developing that gets overlooked is a tolerance for getting less done. That doesn’t mean setting a low level of accomplishment as a standard. It means making the most of the time or energy you have at your disposal, which will often be less than what you planned. You expect to have [...]

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By now, the concept of batching is familiar to nearly everyone who reads productivity books and blogs. Usually batching is illustrated with a specific repetitive process, like checking email. By checking email fewer times each day in the most infrequent intervals possible (this might be once a day for some, every two hours for others). [...]

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One of the overlooked advantages of using context lists to organize your next actions is the stark feedback they provide. It’s easy to see which contexts you’re good at working through, and which ones are getting less attention. When I had a day job, I was always very good at getting next actions at work [...]

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How do you know that what you’re doing right now is absolutely the best thing that you could be doing right now? Where does what you’re doing now fit in the scheme of things? What is the point of it? Whether or not there’s an absolute answer, most of us have experienced the sense of [...]

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I like change. More specifically, I like positive change. Sometimes that involves adopting new technology, sometimes it involves renunciation. Ubiquity was one I adopted, the iPhone is one I’ve renounced. In reply to  my last post, 10 Technologies I Resist, reader steenbok68 was skeptical of my skepticism. Honestly I do not see the point in [...]

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Some technologies we resist out of principle. Some we resist out of fear. Sometimes they’re just not that relevant, or we’re too lazy to engage with the perceived learning curve. Every now and then I feel the urge to reflect on the ones I resist as a reality check. I resisted cell phones for years, [...]

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