productive

​ ​ ​ First, a quick reminder about Designing Your System for Creativity, a live online event in two two-hour sessions that I'll be offering over one weekend in March. We'll exp...

​ ​ ​ Don't invite your thoughts to tea In the return of an occasional series, here are four ideas I've recently found useful/enlightening, and which I didn't want to ignore jus...

When the Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro was a boy growing up in Guadalajara, his mother bought him a Victorian-style writing desk. "I kept my comic books in the drawers, my books and horror action figures on the shelves, and my writing and drawing stuff on the desk," Del Toro recalled in a 2016

A product designer and creative director at Minimalissimo and 099

In... Out...

If you “have optionality,” you don’t have much need for what is commonly called intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills, and these complicated things that take place in our brain cells. For you don’t have to be right that often. All you need is the wisdom to not do unintelligent things to hurt yourself (some acts of omission) and recognize favorable outcomes when they occur.

In my latest essay for The New Yorker, published earlier this week, I tackled the topic of "quiet quitting." This idea careened into mainstream discourse last summer, powered by a viral TikTok video posted by a twentysomething engineer named Zaid Khan. Here's the transcript: "I recently heard about this idea of quiet quitting where, you're

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.”