productive

I’ve been seriously traveling for more than 50 years, and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve traveled solo, and I’ve led a tour group of 40 friends. I’ve slept in dormitories and I’ve stayed in presidential suites with a butler. I’ve … Continue reading →

My personal Obsidian vault template. A bottom-up approach to note-taking and organizing things I am interested in.

How to reclaim your privacy in the surveillance age.

Life is too short for ugly XML.

Getting Started guide to web feeds/RSS

The prolific mind behind "Sicario" and "Yellowstone" only started his writing career at 40. The realest deadlines (a young family, a $350m ranch) have pushed him to grind at an unbelievable pace.

I've been creating small, hand-written websites to organise my files. It's a lightweight, flexible approach that I hope will last a long time.

How I built a solar-powered, self-hosted website with a Raspberry Pi to explore sustainable, local-first web hosting.

The best habit I made in 2024... I call it the “No Excuse Hour.” Sounds simple, but it changed everything. Here’s how it works and why you need it 1/ The “No Excuse Hour” is the first hour of my day.

Do "outline speedrunning": Recursively outline an MVP, speedrun filling it in, and only then go back and perfect. This is a ~10x speed up over the 'loading-bar' style (more on that below) Don't just read this article and move on. Go out and do this for the very next thing you make so y

3.9K votes, 286 comments. 5.4M subscribers in the coolguides community. Picture based reference guides for anything and everything. If it seems like…

This morning I got stuck in the slow lane behind an old man when I was walking down the sidewalk on my way to a Zoom meeting at my neighbourhood coffee shop. Rather than speeding up and hurrying past him, thoughts on my meeting, I did the opposite: slowed down

I suppose I’m a “list person”. Although I would …

Cassidy's current "stack" of task-tracking, calendar, and note-taking apps

“Guests should be selected with as much care as a new Reboux hat, and should be equally becoming, for a hostess should wear her guests at a party as she wears a hat – with an air!”

Public commitment pledges are a surprisingly effective and free way to help you reach your goals. A public commitment pledge is simply writing what you will or won't do, perhaps something you know you find hard, signing it and displaying it publicly. In her excellent book, How to Change, Katy Milkman describes how the simple intervention of a public commitment pledge in doctors' offices significantly reduced prescriptions of unnecessary antibiotics—just through a poster on the wall. Commitment pledges are a form of what Katy calls a soft commitment device (of Odysseus fame). This strategy helps us stick to our commitments even when tempted to go astray. Pledges may work through our desire for consistency and create cognitive dissonance when considering going against the pledge. The benefits of what we desire to do, say "eat cookies," are pitted against the potential guilt or discomfort we'd feel by going against what we said we'd do, not "eat cookies." You don't want to let yourself down. The pledge gives us a greater chance of sticking to our actions and a defence against our present bias. Is there something you wish you'd do more of or less of? A simple public commitment pledge could help you on your way. Other free ways to help you achieve your goals: Temptation bundling, The Fresh Start Effect, commitment device, Nine-enders

I found myself recently, as one does, watching the mini-documentary featurettes included on the DVD for the popular 2014 Keanu Reeves movie, John Wick — ... Read more

Which day have you been the most productive? Is there something you did that made it so productive? And is it something you can do every day?

I wrote the article below about working in a single text file back in July 2006. I stuck with this way of taking notes until the end of my employment with Nortel in 2009. By then, the text file I was...

It's a perfect companion to my discbound paper notebook

Creator Cabins seem to be a growing business – thanks in part to the increase in remote work. Who doesn’t aspire to have a place of their own for uninterrupted creative work? Within that genre resides the more-within-the-grasp-of-an-actual-human cabins for backyards and “gardens.” This seems to be bigger in the

My podcast producer recently turned me onto a show called Acquired, which features its co-hosts, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, diving deep into the backstories ... Read more

Schedule Shut Down, Complete Here’s what happens, without exception, at the end of my normal work day. First, I make sure my master task lists ... Read more