167 Shares There are many ways for students to annoy their professors: “Did I miss anything important?” (No, nothing like that happens in our class.) “Will this test affect my grade?” (No, not at all.) “What are your office hours?” (They’re the first thing on the syllabus.) Most professors understand that such questions are harmless; few, if any, would give the responses I’ve imagined here. An annoyance that’s less understandable is the absence of a staple to hold together pages of written work. No matter how good an essay or report might be, a... More »
358 Shares People who think about hacking their lives and their work often speak of “granularity.” It’s a curious word. The online Oxford English Dictionary offers only “granular condition or quality” as a definition. A more helpful definition comes from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications: “The extent to which a larger entity is subdivided. For example, a yard broken into inches has finer granularity than a yard broken into feet.” To think of tasks and challenges in terms of granularity is to think in terms of breaking them down into smaller and more... More »
According to a survey developed by OfficeTeam, 84% of executives polled consider one or two typos in a résumé sufficient to remove a job-candidate from consideration. One or two typos! Translated into academic terms, one or two typos in a paper would equal a failing grade. I’m not sure how much I want to trust this poll: the number of executives polled is small, and “no typos” might be a rule that strictly applies only in some Platonic ideal (or nightmare) of a workplace. Still, this poll offers a cautionary reminder to... More »
1.1K Shares The Post-it Note was more than just a practical tool — it was also a psychological one. Compared to the clunky machines of the 1980s that generated all those documents, it was a vision of high-tech minimalism. Its edges were sharp and square, with no ugly binding, no perforations, no metal rings. Its color, a subtle but attention-getting yellow, was somehow like the color of thought itself, a lightbulb going off in your head. Devoid of any other graphic elements, it had the effect of a clean, calming, blank screen. And, yet,... More »
