“"But how do you brainstorm remotely? Or riff remotely? Or collaborate creatively remotely? Isn't it better when you're in a room, tossing ideas back and forth?"” I hear some version of this fairly often from people who aren't used to making things with others from far away. There's an assumption that four walls, a whiteboard, a table,...

Breaking Up with Productivity Advice

In August, a reporter from Rolling Stone sat down to interview the San Francisco-based rapper Larry June before he took the stage at Lollapalooza in Chicago. June is known for his status as an independent artist. After an early deal with Warner Brothers fizzled, June went on to produce and release almost all of his subsequent

It may be that simple

The Notecard System - the system used by some of today's and history's greatest artists. Ryan Holiday, Robert Greene, Erin Carr Lee, George Carlin & others all use(d) notecards to produce great work.

Writing personal summaries of what I encounter turns raw info into knowledge

By his last year at Harvard Medical School, Michael Crichton, 26-years old at the time, knew he didn't want to pursue a medical career, so he went to the dean with a proposition. He planned to write a nonfiction book about patient care, he explained, and wanted to know if he could use his final

“Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle.”

A reader recently pointed me toward a long and thoughtful reflection on academic life written by Stephen Stearns, the Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. In a section titled "Learning Balance," he talks about his work habits in the early 1970s, when his first son was born. "I was

How to plan? How hard could it be? 4k words scribbled down on a sunny October afternoon for people in tech observing the Season’s Traditional Annual Planning Process, inspired by a recent interview question (and 25 years of variously painful planning processes).

An exploration of how Darwin kept track of his various notes, enabling him to produce a huge body of work.

In my last dispatch, I reported on how the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson writes in a “supervillain lair” built twenty feet underground near his otherwise unremarkable home in suburban Utah. According to an article published last weekend in The Guardian, Sanderson is not, as it turns out, the first author to use extreme measures to

​ ​ ​ How to get out of a rut It strikes me that a lot of advice on how to get things done is borderline useless, at least for me personally, because I'm so rarely in the right ...

I've a confession… I've been seeing other todo lists. I don't have great reasons. It started because I wanted to have the option of freedom from Apple despite having invested a ridiculous amount of time and automation capital into the ecosystem. ...

We've got the wrong theory about how minds work and it's ruining our lives

The complete & free 35-page Hybrid Work Guide (With Hybrid Meeting Guide). Covering how to: win, leadership principles, your tech stack & delivering in the hybrid workplace. Free PDF Download available

Following a suggestion by Clive Thompson.

Among those who find pleasure in cataloging the habits and rituals of prodigious creatives, the poet Mary Oliver is a familiar companion. Her commitment to long walks outdoors, scribbling notes in a cloth-bound notebook, is both archetypical and approachable. This vision of Oliver finding inspiration in her close observations of nature, made as she wanders

If you’re not getting something actionable out of it, you’re probably wasting your time

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Nothing to prove I think a bit too often, if I’m being honest, about the closing scene of episode two of Aaron Sorkin’s TV-show-about-a-TV-show, Studio 60 on t...

It's in here I promise

Tiago shares 10 favorite quotes from The Bullet Journal Method and how each one shaped his thinking about notes, journaling, and productivity.

​ ​ ​ ​ Do you value The Imperfectionist, and also like getting books for free? I've got three sets of signed copies of all three of my books to give away to three people who co...

​ ​ ​ No escape One of my favourite books on writing is How To Write A Lot, by Paul Silvia, despite the fact that it's not really aimed at people like me (it's for academic soci...

Napoleon Hill is the most famous conman you’ve probably never heard of. Born into poverty in rural Virginia at the end of the 19th century, Hill went on to write one of the most successful self-help books of the 20th century: Think and Grow Rich. In fact, he helped invent the genre. But it’s the untold story of Hill’s…

In my book Digital Minimalism, I emphasized the danger of a newly-emerged condition that I called "solitude deprivation." As I wrote, the introduction of the smartphone caused our relationship with distraction to mutate into something new: "At the slightest hint of boredom, you can now surreptitiously glance at any number of apps or mobile-adapted websites

Everything you need to know about the science of motivation. Unravel the mystery of what makes you driven to act (or slack).

A while back I wrote about What 80% Comprehension Feels Like, and I quoted the English examples used in Marcos Benevides’ excellent presentation which simulate 80% comprehension in English by including made-up English-like vocabulary words. I’ve been thinking about that presentation a lot, both about the impact of such a demonstration, as well as about how it could be accomplished in Chinese. I ended up... Read More