Tools for Thought

What would learning and other aspects of mental performance look like if they complied with the latest findings in brain research? That’s the question that developmental molecular biologist John Medina explores and answers a dozen ways in Brain Rules. While not specifically a self-help book, each chapter has immediately practical implications and applications for the [...]

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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 books [...]

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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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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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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 Economics [...]

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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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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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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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Gina Trapani (along with co-editor Adam Pash) of Lifehacker has been profound influence on my workflow since the blog’s inception in 2005. Launched about a year after Danny O’Brien codified the “life hack” concept based on geeks’ propensity for process optimization, Lifehacker has been an unending stream of tips [...]

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Some of the best project management and workflow books come from the software industry. Programmers are an analytical bunch by nature, and most of their analyses port quite easily to other domains.
Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency takes the themes Tom DeMarco covered in his most well-known book, Peopleware, and [...]

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