Tools for Thought

It has become customary over the last year to dismiss life hacks as a fad. Most of the criticisms are as vague as the arguments in favor of life hacks. One valid criticism, usually not very well articulated, is that hacks focus on techniques rather than principles. But techniques are many, and principles are few, [...]

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Last year, virtual outsourcing made it on my list of 10 Technologies I Resist. Adding a virtual administrative assistant to my workflow seemed like a solution looking for a problem. There wasn’t much that I could imagine a virtual office assistant doing that I couldn’t do personally in much less time and with less management [...]

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Something snapped. Somewhere around early November, I’d been on a Low Information Diet for nearly a month. The first thing I did was dump all of my RSS feeds. Then I prohibited myself from reading books or visiting blogs, forums, podcasts or other infostractions. After weeks of being unplugged, the sense of time recovered was [...]

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How would you like to act on a daily basis? What habits or behaviors would you like to install or uninstall? New Year’s resolutions are helpful for defining those behaviors, but not sufficient for following through with them consistently. Create a visual aid to remind you of habits you want to maintain and those you [...]

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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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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 [...]

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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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Realizing the life we want to live requires action. Discerning that life requires perspective. Action usually requires at least some loss of perspective. It’s hard to drive while reading the map. In a society rich with information, entertainment and commodities, perspective demands that from time to time we enter the devil’s workshop of idleness. An [...]

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One of the occasionally unnerving aspects of working at home is the constant silence that becomes your frequent companion. The option of playing music can get tricky. Songs with vocals tend to steal attention from work. I have plenty of instrumental music, from classical to electronic avant-garde, but I find that there’s only so often [...]

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One small but non-trivial way to cultivate a clear mind when working at a computer is to cultivate a clear desktop. Deleting a program icon from the desktop doesn’t delete the program itself, with rare exceptions. A Windows dialog prompting you to proceed with icon deletion will confirm this prior to execution. If you’ve installed [...]

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