How can you maintain peak concentration during difficult tasks? (Besides just chugging coffee, of course.) Staying sharp can be tricky. Even when you desperately need to focus, it can be hard to stop a wandering mind. You might get stuck, unable to push past what ought to be a simple problem. Persisting through these moments […]

Last week I read John Doerr’s Measure What Matters and Jerry Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics back-to-back. Needless to say, they did not agree. Measure What Matters is a peppy business book about the importance of setting clear goals and backing them with metrics. Acronyms and buzzwords abound. These sentences, found on page 186, might […]

I admire when other authors showcase the best evidence against their position. It’s disappointing to finish a book and find the author ignored a good, well-known rebuttal. In that spirit, I want to consider some of the best arguments I’ve heard against doing the real thing. To recap my position: Most learning occurs by doing […]

I’ve been writing about productivity for fifteen years. In that time, my life has gone through many changes. I’ve gone to university, graduated, lived abroad, built a business, written a book and gotten married. But easily the biggest shift was the birth of my son, last year. How I’ve thought about productivity has shifted dramatically. […]