Tools for Thought

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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