Tools for Thought

Thinking beyond productivity

Entries Tagged as 'Productivity'

Time Management System Smackdown

· 11 Comments

How do you allocate time? Do you find yourself regularly seeking out large blocks of time to complete a task, only to find out afterward that it took a fraction of the expected time? Or do you often find yourself underestimating the time to completion, splitting up a task across multiple interruptions? Some time management [...]

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Tags: Productivity

Total Capture: Getting Things Done by Getting Things Dumped

· 6 Comments

Just as a full voice mail box can’t accept new messages, a person preoccupied with too many thoughts can’t accept new ones. For many people, an excessive workload is anything beyond what they can hold in their immediate memory. That excess is experienced as stress, causing them to either overreact to all the things they [...]

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Tags: GTD · Productivity

Using a Virtual Secretary: Sid Savara on Virtual Assistant Services

· 3 Comments

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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Tags: Lifestyle Design · Productivity · Technology

Six Time Management Tools from Julie Morgenstern

· 8 Comments

Time management has become increasingly important to me, despite my reservations about excessive focus on time scarcity (see my time management system smackdown). In the last six weeks, I’ve gone from full-time freelance writing work to working for the Man, doing analytics for an internet firm in El Segundo — while still maintaining most of [...]

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Tags: Productivity

Curbing Info Porn with Batched Reading

· 21 Comments

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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Tags: Lifestyle Design · Productivity

Separating the Thinking Process from Doing

· 4 Comments

Sometimes “almost” isn’t good enough. A restaurant that’s almost clean isn’t much different than one that’s totally filthy, since both discourage dining. Unfinished thinking has similar consequences for taking action. A To Do list with very broadly defined tasks, like “Write article,” will create unconscious resistance to following through on them if they contain implicit [...]

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Tags: Productivity

Are Time Management Systems More Trouble Than They’re Worth?

· 5 Comments

A friend of mine from out of town met me yesterday in a cafe, catching me at the tail end of my weekly review. When she asked what I was doing, I explained the process, and she responded, “I used to do lists, but they just turned out to be too much work. I found [...]

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Tags: Productivity

Increase Typing Speed, Increase Productivity

· 5 Comments

For anyone who works at a computer daily, few skills have higher leverage over the course of a career than fast, accurate touch typing. The benefits are by no means limited to professional typists, writers and personal assistants, any more than learning to drive is only of use to chauffeurs. Typing is as much a [...]

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Tags: Productivity

Project Focus, One Action at a Time

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Work, time and effort are often considered synonymous, so writing about productivity can be a thorny proposition. Discussing productivity as a measure of results rather than personal sacrifice requires a different frame of mind than appealing to subjective work ethics. A comment in a recent post criticized my observation that “Firewalled focus can be antisocial”, [...]

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Tags: Productivity

Overcoming Distractions by Confronting Them

· 5 Comments

A pink elephant is any claim on attention that’s ignored instead of addressed. Try not thinking of pink elephants, and you’ll find that it’s virtually impossible for a simple reason: you have to think of them in order to process the instruction. The more you ignoring something, the more attention it occupies, or as the [...]

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Tags: Productivity