Book Review: Smartcuts
A book review of Shane Snow’s Smartcuts what what riding waves can teach us about spotting trends, how to hack the corporate ladder, and knowing just enough about the right things.
Articles
Review: Good Todo
Some people – check that – lots of people, need to be able to pick up a device, regardless of their location and interact with their daily list of tasks. Period. No messing around with various contexts, calculating how long a task will take to complete, playing with defer dates and the like. They also want the ability to be able to add to their to-do list directly from their email as this is where a lot of their actionable tasks originate.
Why Starting Your New Year on Groundhog Day Works
In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray’s character lives the same day over and over again. Eventually he gets it right and time begins to move forward again. The movie has become a cult classic and it’s one I watch every year on – you guessed it – Groundhog Day. And Groundhog Day is also a great day to start your new year. Why wait until February 2nd to start your new year? There are a 3 reasons why start your new year on Groundhog Day works: Energy, Space, and Focus.
The Super Bowl and The Power of Deliberate Practice
We are knowledge workers. We get paid to think. Engineers construct, writers argue, lawyers debrief, chefs fuse. Each of these – and an ever growing list of careers – involve a person bringing value by what they know and how to apply it. If you can improve what you know and learn to apply it better, you can increase your value. A carpenter can do more with more tools but needs to learn to use them first. The same goes for our mental toolbox.
Review – Casual.PM
I know that when I first started out life as a Project Manager, I was desperate to find some software that would make the whole process somehow simpler and allow to me a foster a greater level of control over my responsibilities. Well, Casual.PM is an application that seems to respond well to this need. It’s been designed with one clear word in mind: vision.
Book Review: Everything Bad Is Good For You
A great thing about reading books is finding smart people. I first realized this reading Malcolm Gladwell a decade ago and thinking “Wow, this guy is really smart,” and the same thing when I finished Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You. The conclusion of this book is that your vice, while not nice, may not be so bad. A secondary takeaway is to think about reframed, redefined, and updated views and when we do this we can see where things are going rather than where they’ve been.
Why I’m Passionate About Personal Productivity
Personal productivity may seem like a dry area of interest to most, but I’m truly passionate about what it holds. And I’d like to explain why because it holds more than you think it does. Personal productivity goes beyond getting things done. It can help you shape and craft the life you really want.
Review: Shifts for iOS
If you’ve ever put your work calendar into your Google Calendar (or equivalent) and you are an iPhone user then Shifts is an app that will allow you to “shift” away from that and enter your work schedule into it instead. Seem redundant or solving a problem that doesn’t need solving? Think again.
The Cookie Method of Productivity
Keeping track of everything that might make you more productive can be unending. Add this but not that? Is the newest app the best tool? An easier question to answer is what isn’t making me productive. What can I remove that will have a positive effect. Drawing in research in psychology, we have a few answers.