Tools for Thought

Thinking about something more than once usually represents an improvement opportunity. It means that something isn’t getting captured, evaluated, acted on or consciously dismissed. Wouldn’t it be nice not have to think about the same things over and over — things that usually start with “I should . . .”?
Having the same thought twice
Ubiquitous [...]

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If you blog in or around the Los Angeles area, I’ve just launched the Southern California Bloggers Meetup Group. I made the announcement on the Meetup site a few minutes ago, so I have no idea how many people will show up, but I don’t feel like slating the event for later just to feel [...]

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GTD addresses the concept of “work” in the broadest sense. Anything that needs to get done is considered work, whether it’s watering houseplants or editing PowerPoint presentations. If something needs to be done, but hasn’t been done yet, then it needs to be tracked externally to prevent the overhead of having the periodically or constantly [...]

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Productivity bashing as a meme is getting boring. Having dabbled in it myself, I know whereof I speak. It’s not uncommon for bloggers to experience an identity crisis after writing extensively on the same topic for months, but that’s no reason to indulge in self-immolation. A more adaptive response is fuller self-examination.
The word “productivity” has [...]

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From the film Roger Dodger:
Nick: Like, what do you do all day?
Roger: What do I do all day? I sit here and think of ways to make people feel bad.
Nick: I thought you wrote commercials.
Roger: I do. But you can’t sell a product without first making people feel bad.
Nick: Why not?
Roger: Because it’s a substitution [...]

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After I reviewed Julie Morgenstern’s instant decluttering classic, When Organizing Isn’t Enough, the publisher was kind enough to arrange an interview for me with the guru of personal organizing.
Julie’s best known work, Organizing from the Inside Out, focused on finding better homes for the stuff in our lives, making it more accessible. When Organizing Isn’t [...]

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For an intention to move beyond imagination, it needs to be crystallized into a physical action, or an explicitly defined outcome that begins with a physical action. Without this reality check, the loftiest aspirations will remain inert. That doesn’t mean that dreaming is bad, or even unnecessary, but it’s not sufficient.
Imagination might be insufficient, but [...]

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The hard landscape approach to calendar management is founded on the premise that less is more. The fewer commitments you have on your calendar, the more likely you are to keep them. The most reliable number is the absolute minimum — the engagements whose time frames are non-negotiable. These engagements typically fall into three categories:
Appointments. [...]

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Looks like Ben Stein has found an even more pathetic intellectual cul-de-sac than creationism (ahem, intelligent design). It warmed my heart to learn, during his grumpy defense of the yoke, that only six percent of men still wear neckties. “Now, the tie’s situation has become so dire that the American Dress Furnishings Association — the [...]

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There’s a problem with the common advice to focus on priorities. Something is always a priority relative to something else. If you had nothing else to do in the world but one task, you wouldn’t need to “focus” on it as a priority; the action would be self-evident, as it is in life-threatening emergencies. As [...]

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