554 Shares At the center of just about every personal productivity system are lists – GTD has it’s context lists, Pomodoro has it’s action inventory and daily to-do lists, todoodlist has, well, the todoodlist, and so on. But there are a lot of different kinds of lists besides your task or to-do list that can help you be more productive. Lists in general are powerful tools – open-ended, constantly growing, and effective at extending our memories past the 7 or so things we can keep on our mind at any given time. Some of... More »
329 Shares You are surrounded by vampires. They circle you, slowly, eyeing your throat, their teeth glistening in the moonlight. Your heart pounds in your chest as they move in, intent on draining your life’s blood for their own unholy nourishment. A scream rises up in your chest as they close in on you, their fangs bared, and then you feel the first pair of teeth sinking into your throat. “Hey, Dustin, got a minute? I want to tell you about this awesome party I went to over the weekend. We were sooooo wasted,... More »
180 Shares Earlier this week, I began a discussion of the way that manhood in American society is changing. Today, I want to revisit the topic with some of my own ideas about how these changes could lead to a more enriching and satisfying take on masculinity. Before I do that, though, I want to say how thrilled I was at the response the first post got – I had never expected such lengthy, thoughtful comments and the depth of insight that you, Lifehack’s readers, have shared with us. I had intended to respond... More »
258 Shares Manhood is changing. It’s as simple, and as complicated, as that. Two recent events prompted me to write about manhood today. The first was the release of The Shriver Report, a study of the status of women in the United States. The second was the publication of The Art of Manliness, a book of advice on manhood based on the popular blog of the same name. The Shriver Report‘s most stunning finding is that women now make up half of the American workforce, and are the primary breadwinner or co-breadwinner in 2/3... More »
99 Shares What motivates you? While there are thousands, millions, maybe billions of answers to that question, a growing body of research, some of it dating back 50 years, shows two things that don’t motivate us very well – the promise of rewards and the threat of punishment. It seems counter-intuitive, since after all we take it for granted that we need incentives to do work. It’s the basis of our whole economic system, for crying out loud! And yet, the research is abundantly clear: once a reasonable standard of living is achieved, rewards... More »
157 Shares In any significantly big project, there are bound to be times when you lose the track of what you’re doing, when for whatever reason you stop moving forward and, what’s worse, can’t seem to find the motivation to get going again. When we “fall off the wagon” like that, a kind of psychological wall starts building up, making getting back in the swing of things seem more and more daunting. An ugly cycle develops: as the wall gets higher, we get more anxious about climbing it, which makes the wall higher still.... More »
81 Shares With new android phones just out and even more on the way, I thought it would be a good time to release another list of neat-o Android apps. My last Android post (part 1 and part 2) focused on apps specifically for increasing your productivity; this post includes all manner of apps. Some will help you be more productive, some will just help you have more fun. (Note: Some of these are paid applications. As with iPhone apps, an initial rush of free applications in the Android store seems to be giving... More »
29 Shares In a comment on my recent post about breaking up, someone asked if I’d write a follow-up about staying together. I’ve actually written about successful relationships before, based less on my own experience than on the work of relationship psychologists, so I’ll just refer you there if you’re looking for relationship advice. But thinking about what goes into a committed relationship got me thinking about the nature of commitment itself. What does it mean to be committed to something, whether to a person, a cause, a project, a government, a job, or... More »
2.9K Shares Someone on our Skribit page (that’s the little widget on the right-hand side of Lifehack’s pages where you can make requests, which I or other Lifehack writers look at for ideas) requested a post on how to act when you break up with someone. While it’s never easy to break up with someone (assuming it’s someone you actually do like), I feel like I’ve been through enough breakups to have learned a bit about how to make it as painless as it can be for everyone involved. First, some history: I’ve been... More »
164 Shares One of the more useful aspects of Twitter is the ability to quickly broadcast images, videos, and other media to your followers, making it an effective “mo-blogging” (mobile blogging) platform. Twitter doesn’t have this ability built in, though; sending pictures or video clips to Twitter requires using third-party services like TwitPic. Most Twitter clients will automatically upload images to these third-party hosts and add a link to your tweets, making the whole experience rather seamless. This is a pretty good solution for casual sharing, but if you’re using Twitter as part of... More »
11 Shares I admit, I’m a worrier. Always have been – when I was a teenager, I used to lay awake nights worrying about… well, whatever teenagers worry about. In college, I used to worry about classes, girls, money – and eventually about the fact that I was laying up nights worrying instead of sleeping. Today, I worry about… well, I worry about the same things, I guess, except now I’m on the other side of the classroom lectern. Here’s the thing I’ve learned, though: it takes about as much work to do or... More »
38 Shares Believe it or not, one of the most paralyzing fears is the fear of success. That’s right, the fear of achieving one’s goals. It seems insane, because of course, we want to reach our goals, right? I mean, don’t we? The short answer is that yes, we do want to accomplish our goals, but that it’s complicated. There are several factors that complicate our relationship with achievement. For example, we may fear that pursuing our goals might cause tension between ourselves and our family, friends, and other acquaintances. People close to us... More »
In part 1 of this post, I discussed the communications offerings that Google offers and the role they might play for small- and medium-sized businesses. In this follow-up, I will cover their productivity and promotional services, ranging from the productivity suite Google Docs to the free hosted blogging service Blogger. While Google’s communications tools are generally quite excellent, their productivity and promotion tools are much more a mixed bag. After the overview of Google’s various services, then, I’ll offer a short analysis of how well-suited Google apps are for business use overall,... More »
As a big fan of online, Web 2.0 applications, I’ve long followed Google’s ever-increasing stable of web-based services, from Google Docs to Google Voice to Google Reader. Their large and growing collection of online applications and services make it increasingly possible to consider running the bulk of your business using free (or low-cost) Google applications. Even big businesses have gotten in to the act, with mega-corporations like GE giving Google’s Google Apps for Business suite a whirl. And with recent additions to the Google stable such as Postini, an email security and... More »
327 Shares Since publishing a series of posts on dating and living in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been asked several times how I came up with the idea to see dating as a kind of metaphor for life. The immediate source of the story was pretty mundane – someone asked me a question about another article and I used going on a date as an example to illustrate my answer, and thought “hey, there might be something to this more generally!” But the response to those stories has gotten me thinking about... More »
