Tools for Thought

In Reversing the Multitasking Impulse, I focused on multitasking as a problem. Multitasking isn’t inherently counterproductive, but its applications are limited. A strategic approach to multitasking can take advantage of the applications that fall within those limits. Multitasking is commonly perceived as doing two or more things at the same time. More precisely, it involves [...]

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Over the weekend I received a copy of Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development for Smart People, read it, and wrote a draft review without running a word count. I spent this morning cutting it by half, after realizing that the draft was closing in on 5000 words. Evidently the book got to me. I always prefer [...]

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Productivity bashing as a meme is getting boring. Having dabbled in it myself, I know whereof I speak. It’s not uncommon for bloggers to experience an identity crisis after writing extensively on the same topic for months, but that’s no reason to indulge in self-immolation. A more adaptive response is fuller self-examination. The word “productivity” [...]

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Yesterday I talked about the importance of closing open loops. For the greatest peace of mind, it’s important to track all incomplete cycles of action, not just your own. Regardless of how much of your project you delegate, you’re the one who has to live with the results, so if someone else drops the ball, [...]

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On her Abundance Blog, Marelisa Fabrega wrote great post on How to Make Decisions. The article is a virtual toolbox of methods to pick from when faced with a dilemma. I enjoyed it overall, but it opened with a statement reflecting a popular sentiment, especially among activists, that I subtly disagree with: If you have [...]

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Even in its alpha stage of growth, Ubiquity has demonstrated itself as a powerful extension to Firefox search and navigation, but it has one obvious limitation: its scope is limited to Firefox. It would be nice to have identical functionality offline, at the operating system level. Enter Enso Launcher, the offline equivalent of Ubiquity. Like [...]

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In Merlin Mann’s Productive Talk interview series with David Allen, one of the most discussed segments was David’s dismissal of the need to link next actions to projects. He argued that if action and project lists are being reviewed regularly, there’s no need to nest action items underneath project headings to reaffirm their relationships. I [...]

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Since my last post, I’ve been testing some of the newer commands that the user community has been adding to Ubiquity at a furious rate. The first 15 I listed came from Ubiquity’s default installation. For a full list of the default commands, enter help in Ubiquity or type about:ubiquity in the Firefox address bar, [...]

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Yesterday Google released its new Chrome browser. I anxiously downloaded it, tried it, then uninstalled it after 15 minutes. I failed to come across anything that compensated for the lack of extension support. Firefox has too many extensions I’m simply not willing to give up. One of these is the previously discussed add-on for the [...]

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Work is a cycle of thinking and doing. When we want to bring about something new in the world, we spend some time thinking about what needs to be done, then spend some time doing it. Some ways of thinking and doing are more efficient and less stressful than others. One way is to batch [...]

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