productive

We live in the era of efficiency. The advertising industry is infatuated with it. Intoxicated by it. Enamoured and enthralled by it. We want our teams to be lean. Our processes to be agile. And our output to be optimised. Instead of focussing on making our work bigger, we focus on making it work har

It’s time to shed the constant stress and toxic guilt of not checking off enough little boxes on your to-do list.

Apple introduced Focus modes with iOS 15, and it’s a game-changing feature. Here’s how I’m using it to reduce digital distractions every day.

A Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing that creates an interconnected web of thought. Its emphasis is on connection and not mere collection of ideas.

​ ​ ​ The life-changing magic of not tidying up I store all my ideas for writing, plus my reading notes and any interesting quotations I encounter, in an app called Ulysses. (I ...

Cal Newport argues in his book Deep Work that this skill is increasingly rare and valuable. Those who master it will thrive. I've been trying to practice…

Most approaches to time management make things worse. Start by acknowledging your limits

In my attempts to make "smart notes", I have a long trail of missteps and blunders. Here's my attempt to learn from them and document what I've learned along the way.

Obsidian is great at a lot of things, but quick-capturing text is not one of them. I prefer to quick-capture my text in Drafts and then send it to Obsidian using Drafts Actions.

只专注在下一个动作上

The outline method is one of the most common, but still one of the best note-taking methods. It reduces editing and reviewing time of your notes. We explain how it works and discuss it’s pros & cons.

The best books on time management, as recommended by Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

How walks create the foundation of Craig Mod's creative work

Why we’re so tired of optimizing our work lives, and what we should do about it.

Success in most things boils down to a simple, but easily ignored distinction: do the real thing and stop doing fake alternatives instead.

We can’t just walk away from our inboxes, our jobs, and the housework, says Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It. But what if we could change our relationships to them?

The problem with Notion and Roam is aesthetics, and the design consequences. Notion looks polished, like a webpage. Roam’s thought graph looks like art. Apple Notes lacks features. Evernote h…

You want to be productive. Software wants to help. But even with a glut of tools claiming to make us all into taskmasters, we almost never master our tasks.

The world doesn’t actually care if you do the things on your calendar. It’ll keep spinning either way. In fact, in many ways it would prefer that you just didn’t. For, every time …

I first came across Parkinson’s Law in Tim Ferriss’s 2007 book, The 4 Hour Workweek. Ferriss summarized it as follows: “Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline. If I give you 24 […]

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. –Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” 1861 * Charles Darwin was an introvert. Granted, he spent alm…

There are two kinds of programmers, generally speaking. There are programmers who care more about code, and there are programmers who care more about product. The former – I’ll call them “cod…

How you read should be dependent on what you read. In this article, Bruno explores the four reading levels and explains how different books should be read in different ways to do justice to them.

​ ​ ​ My book Four Thousand Weeks is published in the UK tomorrow, which means UK readers have until tonight to take advantage of the pre-order offer: my free five-part email co...

I love this time of year, because as new OSs and devices debut, people who never think about their processes look at what’s new and reconsider how they do…everything. This is where I live year-round. (I’m an overly-analytical person with ADHD, which means I’m extremely detailed about things I can’t