About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
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 …
Continue reading ““Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.””
“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 …
A great talk & animation on motivation for all the slower, smaller, better-smelling horses out there.
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, …
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. …
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 …
Continue reading “Distraction Elimination Week: Day 4: Visual Field”
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 …
Continue reading “Distraction Elimination Week: Day 3: Applications”
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 …
Continue reading “Distraction Elimination Week: Day 2: OS X Finder”
“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 …
Continue reading “Why I Prefer Working Outta the Home Office”
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: …
Continue reading “Distraction Elimination Week: Day 1: Audio”