With a Little Help from Your Friends: How to Tap into the Hidden Potential of the People Who Surround You Every Day

Do you have a dream? Is there a business that you’re dying to launch, a story in your head demanding to be told, or an idea you’re frantic to see made a reality?

If you’re like most people, the answer is “yes.” Or, more likely, “yes, but…” Just about everyone has a crazy dream they’d love to pursue – but they just don’t know how.

What you need is a little expert… » Continue

September 29 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: dream, expert, expertise, friendship, goal, learning, skill | 7 comments»

How to Use Pressure to Get More Done Without Freaking Out

In school, all the other kids who hadn’t started their assignments would freak out the night before it was due. Not me. Not because I’d planned it out weeks in advance and gotten things done the smart way. Heck no! I was just as unprepared as everybody else.

I had tried the “smart way” once. It was stupid, because I’d already refined my last-minute technique and was getting good grades, but… » Continue

September 24 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: | 6 comments»

Back to Basics: Procrastination - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Procrastination is very literally the opposite of productivity. To produce something is to pull it forward, while to procrastinate is to push it forward — to tomorrow, to next week, or ultimately to never.

Procrastination fills us with shame — we curse ourselves for our laziness, our inability to focus on the task at hand, our tendency to be easily led into easier and more immediate gratifications. And with good reason… » Continue

September 19 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: back-to-basics, concepting, idea, planning, procrastination, task | 20 comments»

Why “Just Do It” Just Doesn’t Do It for You

“Just do it!”

“Do Something!”

“Act now!”

“Ready, Fire, Aim!”

We are surrounded, on a day-to-day basis, by the exhortation to act. Hustle, hustle, hustle, get a move on, get going. Whether its a friend giving us advice or a multi-million dollar ad campaign, everyone seems to be telling us – in the vaguest way possible – to get off our butts and go do something. Any-thing.

New research out of the University of

September 15 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: action, brain, doing, mental, motivation, priming, todo-list | 12 comments»

3 Strategies for Dealing With External Distractions

There are different types of distractions, but one of the most common types that derails our work ethic day after day are external distractions. Email, news feeds, Twitter, Skype, those old kettles that squeal, the sound of the newspaper hitting the front door, the neighbour’s little monster who runs past your office window screaming and swinging from your clothesline.

Ahem. Moving on.

Much of the time, we succumb to these distractions… » Continue

September 10 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: attention, distractions, firewalling, motivation | 9 comments»

Back to Basics: The Tickler File

A long-time standby in the productivity realm, a tickler file is a reminder system intended to act as an adjunct to your regular calendaring and scheduling system. Although there are several different kinds of tickler file, the most well-known (thanks largely to David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders) is the 43-folders system, with 31 numbered “day” folders and 12 labeled with… » Continue

September 5 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: back-to-basics, file, folders, office, organization, reminder, tickler-file | 9 comments»

Back to Basics: Reminders

No matter how well you set up your todo list and calendar, you aren’t going to get things done unless you have a reliable way of reminding yourself to actually do them. Anyone who’s spent an hour writing up the perfect grocery list, only to realize at the store that they forgot to bring the list, understands the importance of reminders.

Reminders of some sort or another are what… » Continue

August 22 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: back-to-basics, calendar, gtd, memory, reminder, todo-list, trigger | 17 comments»

Back to Basics: Projects

One of the things that is so hard to grasp about “next actions” or “tasks” is that they are single actions – buy something, call someone, go somewhere, look something up. In and of themselves, they have no end goal other than their own immediate completion.

People don’t think like that way, for the most part, and it is the challenge of productivity experts like David Allen or Stephen Covey… » Continue

August 15 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: back-to-basics, goal, gtd, motivation, organization, project, task | 15 comments»