productive

I recently started giving Apple News another shot. I'm an Apple One subscriber, so I figured why the hell not, I'm paying for it, after all. My issue is that my reading habits are based around RSS and a read later service (Readwise). Personally, I want to find things to

​ ​ ​ I've been thrilled by the response to my note in the last edition about The Art of Imperfect Action, a live online masterclass in two two-hour sessions that I'll be offeri...

Digital hoarding isn't harmless. It's often associated with anxiety and other mental health conditions. It's time to let go of those emails.

Another obsession. Do you read to signal or to learn?

Meditation has reached an interesting place in Western culture. It’s popular, well-reviewed by clinicians and scientists, and most people seem to have tried it. Yet for all the acclaim meditation receives, it’s not very common to actually meditate regularly. As hobbies go, meditation isn’t known for being beginner-friendly. Its learning curve can seem nearly wall-like at the beginning, mainly because

In a recent interview for the BBC podcast Spark & Fire, the novelist Ann Patchett discusses some of the difficulties that come along with finding success as a writer. "It used to be a novel lived very nicely in my head as a constant companion," she explains. "As time goes on and I now have

An interview with Keith Blount, the founder, director and lead developer of Literature & Latte.

​ ​ ​ ​ Before diving into this week’s edition… I’m thrilled (and a little nervous) to announce The Art of Imperfect Action, a live online masterclass in two two-hour sessions I...

Why taking and making notes can change your life for the better

Level 1: NOT BUSY My schedule is wide open. I can choose infinite paths. Zero commitments. The weekend. I sleep like a baby. Life is good, but am I living my best life? Level 2: STUFF TO DO I have a few commitments wandering around my brain. They are reasonable, knowable, and not deadline-based. I

“"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,...

See discussion on Hacker News (a) (610 points, 156 comments) I combed through several years of my private notes and through everything I published on productivity before and tried to summarize all of it in this post. If you’re unproductive right now Here’s what you should do if you’ve been procrastinating for an entire day: Accept that you won’t do anything today and try not to get angry at yourself Set the alarm for the time you will be preparing to go to bed today No, …

When you’re burned out, in the 2pm slump, or not in the mood to “produce,” keep this in mind: 1. It’s OK to not be productive all the time. Humans were likely designed for a 15-hour work week. Go a little easier on yourself. 2. Know that you

An anthropologist explains the roots of our workaholism and offers a vision of a more leisurely future.

It's simpler, more compact, and reusable from year-to-year in a way that no other calendar is. Here's both how it works and how to use it.

This is the second entry of three where I go over what I learned from the user research I’ve been doing for Colophon Cards. My oldest notebook The post where I outline my general theory of notetaking for all to disagree with At the end of my last post, I mentioned that I had switched to pen and paper notetaking in the early 2010s, after years of serious digital notetaking using plain text files.

Breaking Up with Productivity Advice

Earlier this week, the New York Times Magazine published a conversation between me and the journalist David Marchese. We touched on a lot of the ideas about digital technology and the workplace that I elaborate in my 2021 book, A World Without Email. At one point during the interview, however, I came up with a

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

A tribute to the book by Oliver Burkeman, an exploration of time management in the face of human finitude, and addressing the anxiety of “getting everything done.”

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

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 ...