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 […]
How to Free Yourself from Time Poverty
In the industrialized world, few people have to deal with the grim problems of material poverty. Eating too much is a bigger threat than starving. Your home may be small, but it likely has a roof. Basic needs are generally satisfied. Time poverty, however, is a real crisis. As lifestyles have become more complex, the […]
9 Planning Traps and How Not to Get Caught
If you’re like most people, you’re horrible at planning. Even if you think you’re pretty good. Most of the blame goes to some unique weaknesses of the human brain. They cleverly omit areas of uncertainty and blind you to potential traps. I used to be awful at planning. If it weren’t for stored written records […]
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.