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My Favorite Warm Up Exercise Before Writing
Sometimes, I’ve found myself writing with very broken chunks of time: at its most aggressive, it’ll be on demand and with probably 20 minutes in between meetings, with hard deadlines. Other times, late at night, not by choice. In these times, there’s every reason not to write—distraction, despair, and time pressure, not exactly Neal Stephenson’s…
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The Limits of Personal Productivity
I’ve been writing about productivity for close to a decade now. I learned things, piece by piece, and owe whatever career I have in large part due to my research on psychology, motivation, and getting things done. Putting my learnings into practice has paid off. I’m working on a full-time assignment as the editorial director…
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Fake It Till You Make It: When It Works, When It Doesn’t, and Why
When I was 16, I took a high school co-op course that put me in a placement at a local technology holdings company. It was a small family business, employing a few software engineers and a receptionist. The receptionist would tell me about The Secret and the law of attraction, which I realized was a…
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On Education as Investment
When I was leaving high school, I knew why I was going to college: I wanted to get a good job. In spite of Kanye West’s The College Dropout, it was an assumption consistent with the one my parents had. Their generation either worked with a college degree, or without. I hadn’t yet realized that…
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On Earliness
“If you’re 15 minutes early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late. And if you’re late, don’t even bother showing up, because you’re not going to get the job.” These are the words my high school co-op teacher said, which really made an impression on me and my punctuality. Still, my partner and…
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You’ll Never Have Enough Time. Start Your Creative Work Today
In Make Your Art No Matter What, Beth Pickens writes, “The most frequent issue with time for artists is the belief they don’t have enough time for their art practice or as much time as they would like to devote to it.” Artists with all sorts of different schedules, habits, commitments, family expectations, all report…
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Work on the Weekends Only If You’re Learning Something Useful
You should only work on the weekends if you’re learning something that supports your future or puts you on a path to enjoying your work.
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How to Stop Overcommitting at Work: A Summary of Unplanned Work in The Phoenix Project
The Phoenix Project is a fictional story covering how an IT team leads its company, slogging through technological and organizational transformation. It’s an exciting way to learn more about software operations. It’s a business fable, not dissimilar from The Goal, The Wealthy Barber, or The Grumpy Accountant. I want to summarize one of the key…
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How to Break a Creative Block in 24 Hours
Creative blocks are the bane of every person’s existence. These ruts could go on for a week, a month, a year, or even decades. After all, life happens, time gets thin, and expectations get higher. The most consistent solution is simple: to set a tight deadline, and to deliver something by that time. And possibly…
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What It’s Like to Write Articles with Artificial Intelligence
I see GPT-3 both as a threat to the conventional notion of writing, but also as a great new tool for authors. Perhaps an analogy is useful here: I’m a calligrapher, and I learn about the Gutenberg press. It makes sense to learn how to work together with GPT-3 as a collaborator, especially when cost…