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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Last year, virtual outsourcing made it on my list of 10 Technologies I Resist. It seemed like a solution looking for a problem. There wasn’t much that I could imagine virtual assistants doing that I couldn’t do personally in much less time and with less management overhead. More importantly, I didn’t want to end [...]

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Time management has become increasingly important to me. 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 my professional writing. Between working during the day, the 3-4 hour round trip commute, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Idleness often stems more from a lack of clarity than a lack of willpower. Taking action on a vague intention always seems to take more effort than a clearly stated task. It’s best to have the task clearly stated, either to another person, on paper or on a computer, than to have it “understood” [...]

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