Tools for Thought

For over a week I’ve been testing the limits of working offline, with a goal connecting no more than one hour per day. This experiment in renunciation conceptually overlaps with Tim Ferriss’ Low Information Diet, but for the time being I’m only concerned with reducing my connectivity, not necessarily my intake of information. Even still, [...]

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“I think there’s sort of a linguistic thing going on.”
Hearing the above remark by Clay Collins in a talk with Duff McDuffee about the limits of the word “productivity,” a frustration I’ve harbored for weeks suddenly uncoiled.
I’m over productivity. It’s outlived its usefulness as a focal point and framework for meaningful discussion.
Through overuse and misuse, [...]

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Sometimes when we need to work on a project, we don’t have the resource we need. If I need to access the internet to do some research, and I’m not at a computer, I don’t worry about it since the next action isn’t currently actionable.
Not usually. But it can still be worthwhile to question that [...]

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In any situation, certain givens define the range of how we perceive it. By expanding the scope of considerations with a conscious effort, we can increase the span of our attention to aspects that might have otherwise been missed.
Consider All Factors (CAF) is an attention directing tool designed to do this. During a defined interval [...]

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Last week, I switched to a paper organizer to manage my calendar and action lists, and found that I got nearly twice as much done as usual. During that week, a couple of computer problems converged to prevent me from using my laptop for writing, forcing me to work around the issue by writing exclusively [...]

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Anyone who’s been reading Tools for Thought on a regular basis has certainly picked up on the theme that managing attention and focus matters far more to me than managing time. While at the library a couple of days ago I allowed my attention to wander to a shelf with Sam Horn’s ConZentrate. So I [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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