There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done. There is no editing stage. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if […]
Category: Productivity
Introducing: The Daily Reality Planner
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” – President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nov 14, 1957 If you’re like me, you’ve continually struggled with answering 1 question: “Where did today go?” To Do lists are helpful in identifying what should be done. Assigning those To Do items a date and time on the calendar declares when […]
Dan Pink on Incentives and Work.
A great talk & animation on motivation for all the slower, smaller, better-smelling horses out there.
Corkboard Productivity
There’s a corkboard downstairs in what I enjoy calling the ‘machine shop’. In fact, there are 2 corkboards. A big one on the main wall, behind a heavy, wooden desk with a dozen perfectly sized drawers – and a second, smaller one on the back wall. When we moved into this house 3 years ago, […]
How I Reached Inbox Zero(ish)
Something must be in the air. Like Dave, I’ve been making a concerted effort to clean out my email inbox over the past couple weeks. All year, I’ve been fluctuating between 80 – 140 messages, not including the hundreds sitting in my ‘Respond to’ folder. For the past week, I’ve been steadily at Inbox Zero. […]
Distraction Elimination Week: Day 4: Visual Field
There are 2 major visual field distrations; inside the monitor, outside the monitor. First, inside the monitor: Since 1997, my desktop background has been “Solid Gray Medium”. I’ve played with other shades of gray, but always found SGM to be the most neutral, keeping the focus on the applications I’m working in and making screenshots […]
Distraction Elimination Week: Day 3: Applications
I normally have around 10 different applications open and running at any given time – a persistent set of communications apps (Adium, Mail.app, SpamSieve), a couple browsers (Safari, Camino), and the 2-4 apps necessary for whatever I’m doing at the time. Adium’s Preferences really let you dial it’s presence down. In Advanced > Contact List […]
Distraction Elimination Week: Day 2: OS X Finder
The human eye is extremely sensitive to changes in the visual field – especially in the periphery. The OS X Finder places quite a few distractions – changing things unrelated to the task at hand – in the edges of the screen. Let’s eliminate them. Start by opening up System Preferences: Dock: Check “Automatically hide […]
Why I Prefer Working Outta the Home Office
“You’d think working in close proximity to your co-workers would keep you accountable, but most times it has the opposite effect. We actually attempt to hide ourselves in a cloud of co-workers hoping no one notices our lack of speed and productivity.” – Arik Jones Unless everyone in the office is working on the exact […]
Distraction Elimination Week: Day 1: Audio
Each day this week, I’m minimizing some distraction on my MacBook Pro. Today, it’s the unnecessary and often redundant audio noises. In the OS X Finder, go to System Preferences > Sound and make sure all three checkboxes are unchecked. In Mail.app, go to Preferences > General and select “None” in the New mail sound: […]