Stay Focused: 5 Ways To Increase Your Attention Span
you guys are anything like the readers of Slate.com, 38% of you are already gone. You couldn't stay focused long enough to engage with this post at all. Is it time to scroll to see more? Too much effort, too busy, meh, gotta go, HEY LOOK SOMETHING SHINY!!! -- another 5% of you just vanished. Yes, attention spans are that bad. Now I'm wondering if I should have made this post shorter. Cal Newport, Georgetown professor and expert on…
3 minutes
Time Management Skills Are Stupid. Here’s What Works.
t the schedule down for a second. Consider something I read in The Power of Full Engagement: Maybe it's not about time. It's about energy. Via The Power of Full Engagement: Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance. It's a qualitative lens instead of a quantitative one. Focusing on your time management skills sounds great but all hours are not created equal. We're not machines and the time model is a machine model. Our job isn't to be…
4 minutes
Work Smarter Not Harder: 17 Great Tips
Dan Pink's Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself he closes the book with a long, excellent list of "Work Smarter Not Harder" type advice for people who want to start working for themselves. Frankly, the list is so good I think everyone would benefit from it. Below are my favorites. I've included links to research and prior posts backing Dan's advice. via Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself: Make a "to don't" list. Another gem from the…
4 minutes
This One Simple Thing Can Make Your Life Much Better
Buy A Notebook Many people have written to me saying they love all the research on bettering themselves but need that first step on how to shoehorn it in to their day-to-day life. Incorporating a lot of the blog's strategies can be as easy as buying a notebook. (No, it doesn't need to have glitter on it or say "MY SECRET DIARY" on the front.) Others might think: "I don't need to write stuff down. Reading is enough." Nope.…
6 minutes
“Keep it simple stupid” is great advice. Here’s the best way to do it.
at's the best way to keep things simple? John Maeda is a computer scientist -- and an artist. He's the President of the Rhode Island School of Design and founder of the SIMPLICITY consortium at the MIT Media Lab. His book, The Laws of Simplicity, is a short set of meditations on simplicity, and how we can use it to better our lives and work. The Kiss Principle ("Keep it simple stupid") is an old design idea from the Navy.…
2 minutes
Chronic Procrastination: 5 Weird (But Effective) Ways You Can Conquer It
w to beat chronic procrastination I've posted a fair amount of research related to procrastination in the past, let's round it up so we have a useful list to refer to when willpower gets low. 1) "Positive" Procrastination Yes, that’s right, procrastination can be a good thing. Dr. John Perry, author of The Art of Procrastination, explains a good method for leveraging your laziness: The key to productivity, he argues in “The Art of Procrastination,” is to make more commitments — but to be…
4 minutes
Spend time wisely: How to focus on the things that matter
w Can You Spend Time Wisely? We all wonder where the hours go. There's a good reason for that -- we're absolutely terrible at remembering how we really spend our time. Via What the Most Successful People Do at Work: A Short Guide to Making Over Your Career: Hunting through data from the American Time Use Survey, conducted annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other time diary projects, I came to the inescapable conclusion that how we think we…
5 minutes
10 tips to increase your productivity:
d you know double tapping the space bar on your smartphone will automatically enter a period and add a space to make ending a sentence easy? I didn't. In this TED Talk, David Pogue gives 10 quick technology tips that will increase your productivity. Frankly, I was embarrassed that I didn't know many of these. Pogue is a technology columnist for the New York Times and author of more than 60 books. Join 25K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via…
1 min read
