Dave Allen’s wildly popular, Getting Things Done system is great to stay organized. It achieves the goal of storing information, tasks and commitments so your brain doesn’t have to. Ever since I began working with the system the burden to my memory has gone down substantially. The only problem is that GTD isn’t for everyone. […]
Are You Giving Yourself Busy-Work?
Busy-work is work for the sake of work. You aren’t doing anything meaningful, just doing things to appear busy. Although few people do this intentionally, I believe that an unreasonable proportion of what we do simply doesn’t matter. It exists only to fill time. I’m midway through a trial to severely cut my e-mail and […]
Goalless Action
Is having goals making you unhappy? This has always been a difficult question for myself, with pundits on both sides trying to make the answers seem cut and dried. I think the answer is a little more complex. Goal-setters often describe their goalless counterparts as being lazy wanders who never accomplish anything. They never learn […]
Creative Acceleration: 11 Tips to Engineer a Productive Flow
Focus is essential to getting work done. If you can’t engineer a productive flow to your work, everything crawls to the finish. Tasks become a sluggish crawl to the finish that is both inefficient and almost painful to work through. Any writer that has felt writers block or a programmer stuck on a difficult problem […]
I'm a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, podcast host, computer programmer and an avid reader. Since 2006, I've published weekly essays on this website to help people like you learn and think better. My work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, TEDx, Pocket, Business Insider and more. I don't promise I have all the answers, just a place to start.