“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Every fad diet and nutrition philosophy has one problem in common: they all ask you to mistrust the signals coming from your body, and to instead place your trust in an external authority. Even if the diet succeeds, you’ve…
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,…
By Praxis Fellow FRANK ANAYA Every day you journal, you’re bringing fresh soil into your idea garden. But if you never look back at what you wrote, you’re losing the opportunity to till that soil, to work it and see what grows. Experts like Tim Ferriss and Julia Cameron say that the process of journaling is…
Over the past 6 months as COVID has raged around the world, millions and millions of people have had to switch abruptly from working in an office, to working from home. Even if you had previous experience occasionally working remotely, you’ve probably noticed that doing it FULL-TIME is a completely different experience. You need a radically higher level of…
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…
There is a secret to radically improving your productivity – it’s called a Weekly Review. It’s not a very secret secret. It’s a secret hiding in plain sight. We’ve all heard countless times that we should take some time each week to review our schedule and priorities for the week. We’ve all heard it, but…
This post is also available in Ukrainian When I first picked up this book, I wasn’t quite sure what it had to do with me. It is a book about trauma – what it is, where it comes from, and how to treat it. But I had never experienced abuse, or been caught in a…
I recently interviewed Federico Gonzalez, an Argentinian educator in Buenos Aires, about his experience teaching some of the methods from my Building a Second Brain course to three groups he works with in Argentina. The first group is sixth-year students at Escuela Técnica del Gran Bs As in the La Matanza municipality of Buenos Aires. They…
I recently read and took notes on You Need a Budget (YNAB-Affiliate Link), a popular book on personal finance and budgeting (with accompanying software for managing budgets) by Jesse Mecham. My interest in this book is three-fold: I’m terrible at budgeting and need help I want to borrow principles and methods for managing money to help people…
In The Weekly Review is an Operating System, I detailed the process I go through each week to capture any new open loops, clear my workspaces, and nail down the events and commitments for the week. In this article, I’d like to do the same for my Monthly Review (MR). Because the MR touches on…
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Forrest Bryant at Evernote HQ, for my first ever live on-camera interview, broadcasting on Facebook Live. The topic was habit formation and behavior change, two of my favorite topics. Check out the full blog post for a video recording of the interview, a written summary of…
In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen calls the Weekly Review the “Master Key to GTD.” He claims it is the single most critical habit one must adopt to capture open loops, manage commitments on an ongoing basis, and maintain a “mind like water.” Yet it is also the most difficult habit to maintain….
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