Betterment

Suppose you could add an extra two hours to every day: what would you do with your time? Would you take up a new hobby? Spend more time with friends or your family? Learn a new skill? Or simply give yourself more time to relax? In imagining how you’d spend an extra two hours, magically […]

Most developers often spend time on their setup, and I am no exception. These devices, tools, and software help me achieve that.

If you’ve borrowed money or sold shares, you’ll need to build something that’s worth more than your labor. Here are some key pillars where value lives: Customer tractionPermission…

If you’ve been following productivity advice for any length of time, you’ve probably experienced the following cycle: Why is productivity so difficult to sustain? Listen to this article I suspect a major cause of the difficulty is that we readily conflate two different ideas of what it means to “be productive.” The first is a […]

A fundamental building block of civilization is the understanding that contracts matter. Regardless of where someone is on the current political spectrum (from Alinksy to Mises), things can be unde…

We’ve heard this story many times. The one about the hippy who travels all the way to Bali. Climbs a mountain, sits on top of it for a week, and is

Peter Drucker, the eminent management theorist who coined the term “knowledge worker,” made a compelling case for figuring out where your time goes: Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time […]

Many projects are never finished. There are countless broken and not-quite-fixed cars in garages. There are crafts projects, massive redevelopments and everything in between. They sit unfinished be…

There are deep reservoirs of wisdom in the old carpentry adage, “measure twice, cut once.” The idea is that it’s easier to ensure you do something right

Brand to Know: Norda

Here’s a breakthrough that’s about to happen somewhere: A GPT that reads every email that anyone in your organization has ever sent and makes it easy to ask it questions about what the …

Particularly when it comes to the future. And perhaps about the past. More often than not, we find ourselves in situations where we don’t know. Where we can’t know. That’s a given…

The Journey Not the Destination. Focus on what you can control, and move past the narrow focus on outcomes.

Human beings never reveal all of our emotions. We don’t simply blurt out the first thing that pops into our head in a meeting, or insult someone upon meeting them. We’re able to give pe…

Perhaps you only acknowledge and focus on problems where you know and are comfortable with the appropriate response. Denying the existence of the other ones is easier than dealing with them. Or it …

The things we do each day, every day, often arrive without intent. By the time we realize that they’re now habits, these random behaviors have already become part of how we define ourselves a…

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founders of 37signals, advocate for taking extended breaks from work, as outlined in their book "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work." While this practice is relatively common in many parts of the world, it's less common in North America.In this...

Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” imagines a time in which the government enforces the absolute physical and mental equality of all citizens. The beautiful must wear masks. The most graceful dancers are saddled with weights. The strong have bags of birdshot padlocked around their necks. And the intelligent — like George Bergeron — are […]

Has life been feeling flat?  Do you not get the same pleasure from activities you once enjoyed?  Is it feeling harder to get motivated to do things? Are you unhappy with a habit like constantly checking your smartphone or watching porn? Do you want to kick an addiction to alcohol or tobacco? If you answered […]

There are things we avoid looking at too closely. If we looked, really saw what was happening, we’d have to change our minds, admit we were mistaken, refactor our priorities or take action. I…

In many of my posts I share solutions to technical challenges I have come across. In this post there is certainly an element of that, but it is building on some earlier work and is perhaps more about sharing a real view of what I use day to day, as a way of providing a bit of insight or inspiration into how you may be able to employ something similar. Specifically, in this post I am going to share some details of my “general” meeting template in Obsidian. Oh, and that’s “general meeting” template as in a generic template for a general, run of the mill, ad hoc meeting, not a general meeting as in governance (e.g. AGM, EGM).

It’s tempting for a creator. To make a pop hit, a song or a book or a meme that becomes a popular idea and part of the culture. In our lifetimes, it’s become possible to imagine that yo…

Hustle harder. Run more ads. Spam people. Interrupt. Make the logo bigger. Post again. Post again. Add more blurbs. Push the press release to irrelevant people. Do one more ad. Use AI to create fau…

There’s a famous Cherokee myth about good and evil. As it goes.. An old man was teaching his grandson about life. “There’s a battle going on inside every

As we continue to face difficult choices and work to make things better, it’s quite likely that the alternatives being presented aren’t ideal or even appealing. Many organizations and c…

Let's talk about workflows. If you are a white collar worker, chances are that you spend most of your day creating or editing digital files. Whether you are a programmer, sysadmin, accountant, salesman or a CEO, you will be spending considerable part of your day messing with data, grouped as some sort of logical entity: a document, spreadsheet, source code, etc.. Different people have different strategies and approaches for this sort of work. For example,

After 2022, it’s hard to tell for sure. And going forward, public life is going to be even more rumor-driven than it is now. Any video, any voiceover, any photograph–we can’t be s…

Could we change our minds? When was the last time new information caused you to walk away from an idea you were confident in? It gets harder and harder to do, and more and more important.