The Alternative Productivity Manifesto. Challenges the sacred cow of productivity as self-development and as the royal road to fulfillment. In a world where increases in worker output in the last half century have not translated to increases in pay or decreases in the workweek, it may be time to pause and reexamine the more-is-better ethos. (The Growing Life)

Why You Should Kick the “Versus” Habit. Life is simpler when values and options are reduced to choices between mutual exclusives, but we all know that reality is more intricate than that. A primer on how to slow down, think more, and question assumed certainties. (Lifehack.org)

Productivity v. Ingenuity. An arguably fruitful application of the “versus” habit and a further critique of productivity — there seems to be a trend emerging here: a movement to put the value of productivity in context. I wonder if productivity has reduced the scope of our current thinking, or if our current thinking has reduced the scope of productivity. (Dumb Little Man)

8 ninja uses for binder clips. Surely there’s only one true ninja use for the binder clip: the Hipster PDA. Apparently there are other ways to repurpose this lowly office supply, like the Hanging Note System. (Cranking Widgets)

I’ll keep writing about productivity, but it’s always been my intention for the blog to move beyond cranking more widgets, so expect to see more diversity this month. In that spirit, let’s see what else was going on out there this week.

Alltop’s Lifehacks page. Tools for Thought has been selected for inclusion into Guy Kawasaki’s new blog aggregator. Alltop consists of single pages for the top blog categories, and each page has links to the top 40 blogs in each respective category, with links to each blog’s last four posts. The pages are updated ever 10 minutes, so it’s a great way to stay current without collecting feeds. It’s also great for discovering similar blogs. (Alltop)

Cuckoo, cuckoo. Nicholas Carr’s hilarious lancing of the Gaia-like “global consciousness” meme that’s been a staple of internet discourse since the open-sourcing the World Wide Web 15 years ago. “Define consciousness downward sufficiently and — cuckoo! — a global one emerges.” (Rough Type)

70 Simple Power Tao Secret Hacks to Writing the Perfect Productivity Article, Plus a Guide & System for Doing It. Clay Collins must channeling Terry Southern. This article is even funnier than Carr’s. The hacks are all here: write numbered lists (or “Don’t use transitions”), quote an eastern mystic, add a serene picture. And to think that I’d almost forgiven myself for writing a list article: Six Critical Information Resources for Your Cell Phone. (The Growing Life)

Three Ways to Mitigate Attention Crash, Yet Still Feel Informed. This looks like a losing battle to me: the attempt to fill every interstice of idle time with more information. Before pursuing the attempt to feel informed, it’s important to ask, “At what point will I feel informed?” What is enough information? Is it healthy to look at all windows of time in terms of their perceived lost opportunity cost? Definitely worth further consideration. (Micropersuasion)

Why Your Mental RAM Can Cut It. An interpretation of a passage in my Pattern Language entry on the Weekly Review. My use of “mental RAM” was a little more metaphorical than how it was portrayed (positively) here, but I’m enough of a geek to enjoy having a “four-bit brain.” (Team Taskmaster)

And now for a few favorite dispatches from elsewhere in the blogosphere this week.

Simple Manifesto: Break Free from the Tyranny of the Clock. A different perspective from mine on our society’s organization around “clockhood.” Bergson used to call this post-clockhood experience “duration.” As I’ve written earlier, I think timers used strategically can release our attention from the passage of time to focus on the priority of our choosing. But Leo is great at getting us to question our assumptions. (Zen Habits)

Easy Ways to Go Green with Your Computer. An Earth Day installment for reducing your PCs energy footprint. There are great tips here for formatting pages before printing to minimize ink and paper waste. I especially love the suggestion for setting µTorrent to auto-shutdown the computer when downloads are complete. (Lifehacker)

Fireside Chat: Google and Tim Ferriss: In this video, Tim spends nearly a quarter of his infamous workweek shooting the breeze with the elves at Google UK. He stresses the intelligent use of data — relevant data — in making decisions, the difference between busyness and productivity, and the need to plan leisure activities in advance to avoid choosing work over boredom. (Tim Ferriss)

Email Insanity & the 0.001 Challenge. Another disquisition from the Over-300-Email-a-Day set. How would you write your email differently (or would you?) if you were one of a thousand correspondents in your recipient’s inbox? I’d probably add a footer linking to Merlin’s terrific Inbox Zero series. (43 Folders)

Could You Go Without Your Computer for a Day? I’m looking forward to May 3, when participants in Shutdown Day unplug for 24 hours. PDAs and cell phones are frowned upon, but note strictly prohibited. (Web Worker Daily)