92 Shares Give up the idea of quick weight loss, and focus on building sustainable habits.
398 Shares The essential email habits you should follow to stop yourself from getting overwhelmed.
566 Shares If you’ve always dreamed of being the next Hemingway or Vonnegut (or even Grisham), or perhaps if you just want to write better essays for school or posts for your blog … you need to sharpen those writing skills. Becoming the best writer you can be isn’t easy, I won’t lie to you. It takes hard work. But it’s worth the effort. And if it seems like an insurmountable task, there are some concrete things you can do today that will get you on the road to improvement. Personally, I’ve been a... More »
9.4K Shares “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” — W. Somerset Maugham Somewhere after “lose weight”, “stop procrastinating”, and “fall in love”, “read more” is one of the top goals that many people set for themselves. And rightly so: A good book can be hugely satisfying, can teach you about things beyond your daily horizons, and can create characters so vivid you feel as if you really know them. If reading is a habit you’d like to get into, there... More »
2.8K Shares Consider this: in just a few short years, the open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia has made closed-source encyclopedias obsolete — both the hard-bound kind and the CD-ROM or commercial online kind. Goodbye World Book and Brittanica. Sure, these companies still exist, but their customer base is rapidly shrinking as more and more people would rather go with Wikipedia — it’s free, it’s easy to use, and it’s much, much more up-to-date. This is but one example of how the concept of open source has changed our lives already. Over the next 10 years or... More »
255 Shares “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” — Hans Hoffman Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” — Henry David Thoreau For today’s knowledge workers, every distraction is a drain on productivity and sanity. Every ringing phone, instant message, flashing email reminder, pile of papers, cluttered sticky notes and phone messages and knick knacks and memo posted on the wall — each of these things slows you down, wastes your time and energy, and stresses you out. To achieve calm, and simple... More »
84 Shares You’ve got your list of things you want to accomplish for today, and yet, after a series of meetings that you had to go to throughout the day, none of the things on your list got done. That’s because meetings are almost always a huge drain on your time, and should be killed on sight. Think about the last few meetings you attended — did you sit through them wishing you were somewhere else, or finish the meeting wondering what the point of the meeting was, or worse yet, feel that the... More »
462 Shares If you are into productivity on your computer, you probably already use your keyboard and its shortcuts as much as possible. And if you’re on Windows, you’ve probably also check out the awesome potential of AutoHotKey, which can make your keyboard hum like nobody’s business. But most people haven’t tapped into the true power of AHK, and explored all the ways it can turn the keyboard into a productivity machine. For Mac users, you already have the fantabulously wonderful Quicksilver, and if that doesn’t completely meet your needs, try TypeIt4Me for text... More »
481 Shares With the proliferation of web services — there’s a new one out each day, it seems — it feels like we’re always creating new accounts, each with a different username and password. The easy options — using the same password each time or writing them down on paper or in a spreadsheet — aren’t exactly the most secure. In fact, security experts strongly warn against these options as they leave you vulnerable to online theft. So what’s a web surfer to do? If you’ve got more than a dozen services, you’re not... More »
149 Shares The Washington Post recently had an article on email bankruptcy that discussed a number of people who are giving up on email (or just deleting all their old messages) after being buried under the pile of messages. Merlin Mann responded by saying that even bankruptcy isn’t enough to save him: A one-time erasure of communication debt would give temporary relief, but the basic challenge remains; the net number of requests for my attention exceed my ability to provide that attention by at least an order of magnitude. And the disparity around my... More »
43.1K Shares One of the coolest things about Gmail is its filters — set up properly, filters can add loads of functionality to your already-powerful Gmail account. Save time and space, rid your inbox of unwanted emails, and turn your Gmail into a multi-functional tool with simple filters. There are some limitations to Gmail’s filters that I’d like to see improved in the future, including: the inability to mark a post as read the inability to create live “smart folders” difficulty in adding a large number of email addresses to a filter But all... More »
269 Shares Do your days seem to be crazy busy and your to-do list filled up with an endless supply of tasks? Is your calendar full and your work day a non-stop rush from one thing to another? If so, you may have too much on your plate. It’s time to step back, take a few minutes, and pare down that to-do list to just the bare essentials. Imagine, for a moment, that you have only a few things on your list for today. Imagine the peace that comes from that simple little fact.... More »
5K Shares If you’ve got a big block of free time, the best way to put that to use is to relax, have fun, decompress from a stressful day, or spend time with a loved one. But if you’ve just got a little chunk — say 5 or 10 minutes — there’s no time to do any of the fun stuff. Put those little chunks of time to their most productive use. Everyone works differently, so the best use of your free time really depends on you, your working style, and what’s on your... More »
184 Shares “If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.” – Henry Ford This famous quote from quintessential American success story Henry Ford encapsulates the very core of why positive thinking works, and why it is one of the most often touted tool of personal development literature. It also highlights, by contrast, what is wrong with the (in)famous book and DVD “The Secret”, cited recently by another blogger as one of the most successful infomercials ever. Positive thinking works not because of any cosmic or... More »
709 Shares Need to stay on top of the breaking news or hottest trends in your line of work? Or are you a blogger who wants to keep up with your niche without a ton of surfing? If you’re like me, you like to get the most bang for your precious time — and you don’t want to waste it spending hours searching for the best and hottest stuff in your field. The solution: Get all the top news in your field in one feed reader. With the right setup, you can monitor the... More »
