Imagine you sit down to work at your computer determined to really get things done. You brew a strong cup of coffee, turn off your phone, put on your favorite playlist, and resolve to not get up before you’ve made real progress on your most important tasks. Even if you already know what your top…
We’re supposed to hate email and everything it represents. But I have a confession to make. I love email. (Scandalous, I know.) When it comes to email, I always think about the alternative: What would I do if there was no email at all? Write letters? Telegrams? Or most terrifying of all… get on the phone…
I recently hosted Dan Charnas, author of the book Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-en-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind (affiliate link), for an in-depth conversation about the most interesting, impactful principles from his work. Dan takes us on a fascinating journey through his career in the music business, as one of the first…
Knowledge work is unique among skilled professions in that we lack a culture of systematic improvement. Other skilled trades – from carpenters to welders to nurses to pilots – have been around long enough and are repeatable enough that the best practices are widely understood. How to frame a door, how to weld a seam,…
There is no perfect algorithm that will tell you how to maximize your time for the things you most care about. You need to rely on your intuition. You need self-awareness to know what is truly important and understand what is actually stopping you from getting something done. But this perspective is often missing because…
I rage quit my consulting job in June of 2013. I had had enough of the consulting world. Enough of the overwork and burnout, enough of the lack of guidance and support, and enough of working on other people’s goals instead of my own. A couple weeks later, on my first day newly unemployed, I…
I recently sat down with Alex Strick van Linschoten and Matt Trevithick on their podcast Sources and Methods, for an hour-long chat about my latest thinking on methods for organizing knowledge work, and the weaknesses of the ‘deep work’ trend. Click here to visit the Sources & Methods website for the audio recording, or listen below:
I’m proud to announce my new book, The Heart is the Bottleneck. In this book, I explore and dissect a wide range of topics related to productivity and personal effectiveness. From note-taking and writing, to creativity and curation, to being a digital nomad and working with a virtual assistant. Tying together these topics is the…
I recently joined Erik Torenberg on the Venture Stories podcast. We had a very wide-ranging conversation including: Why productivity is not an end in and of itself Why content creation (not just consumption) is integral to your career How to better deal with the 11 hours of media a day that the average person consumes…
How does it feel to have a Second Brain? It feels like raw power. Like energy coursing into my mind and body from every source of information I have access to. Like the world is made of ideas, and I have a key to its underlying reality. It feels like I am the master of…
This essay was originally posted on the Ribbonfarm blog. The organizing principle of the modern world is pain. Avoiding it, yes. But also trading in it, taking refuge in it, and using it to justify our actions. Pain has so many uses. Why would you ever give up such a versatile tool? We trade in…
This is a conversation with Allison Andrade, an undergraduate student at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. She was one of several cohorts of students taught to use Progressive Summarization by a professor, Wes Daniels (who has written about that experience here). In this wide-ranging conversation we talk about: My background in religion and how…
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