#productivity (196 links)
- Epictetus Ran a Better Productivity System Than Any App You’ve Bought joanwestenberg.com
You could call this the Jurisdiction Method. Before you decide to track something, ask: whose responsibility is this? If it’s yours, take action. If it belongs to someone else, you might influence it, but you don’t own it, and you shouldn’t let it take over your attention just because you’re tracking it.
- The Imperfectionist: Acting because you don't have to ckarchive.com
I’ve long been allergic to the notion, prevalent in self-help circles, that if you truly managed to liberate yourself from your issues, you’d ideally spend your days just sort of passively floating around, smiling at everyone, maybe attending the occasional yoga retreat, but not much more. “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become” is a phrase I’ve encountered multiple times online in recent months. And yes, sure, if your ambition was only ever a function of anxiety, becoming less ambitious would be an excellent development. Then again, the desire to create remarkable outcomes in your creative work, relationships or community – or even just in your bank balance – might just be an authentic part of who you are, once the clouds of insecurity begin to clear.
- The Imperfectionist: Act fast ckarchive.com
There’s a piece of advice I still struggle with, but that I’m more and more convinced lies at the heart of meaningful productivity, successful creative work, and a more vibrant life in general. That advice is: act fast. Move quickly. When you get a good idea, make it your default policy to put it into practice as soon as you reasonably can.
- Flow state: Why fragmented thinking is worse than any interruption blog.stackblitz.com
- Cron Calendar cron.com
Maybe this time all the exciting calendar start-ups won't go all "our incredible journey" and disappear.
- List one task, do it, cross it out | Oliver Burkeman oliverburkeman.com
- Hook hookproductivity.com
- Scrum disempowers developers | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
- Timeful timeful.com
<blockquote>Everything that competes for your time, in one place Your events, to-dos and good habits all appear on your daily calendar.</blockquote>
- > Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying o... | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
<blockquote>There may certainly be things you'd find more fulfilling. But if you need to do stuff to be happy, you are letting yourself suffer from attachments to things that more the most part are relatively inconsequential.
PG's essay suffers from this assumption that happiness is tied to achievements.
I used to think that too. The problem with that line of thinking is that it often leads to putting the shutters on and focusing on getting stuff done to get your happiness from it eventually, while ignoring all the sources of happiness around you. Further, that makes procrastination worse, in my experience: It creates guilt that you're picking the short term pleasures instead of doing the stuff you're sure will make you fabulously happy later, once you've just achieved something.
These days, I still get stuff done - more than ever, in fact -, but I might suddenly stop during my commute and look up at the clouds and enjoy the sight, or just close my eyes for 10 seconds and enjoy the calm, and I'm happy whether or not I'm doing anything. The two are not related. If you can't be happy even while doing the dishes, or fighting your way onto a commuter train, or carrying out some mind-numbingly boring menial work, you're missing out.</blockquote>
<blockquote>There's one view of psychology according to which everything we do to make ourselves miserable – every dysfunctional behaviour, from minor to destructive – begins as an approach that once worked well, often in childhood, then passed its sell-by date. We're not idiots who choose unhappiness; rather, we develop coping mechanisms that make sense at the time.</blockquote>
- Asana asana.com
Rands says use things instead of Things. But I like Things.
- Cruise Sheet - Find hidden hot cruise deals cruisesheet.com
I (could be) on a boat.
- Check you're wearing trousers first robertheaton.com
<blockquote>Simple solutions are almost always quickest, easiest and most effective. Maybe sometimes it does turn out that they aren’t enough and you do in fact need to do something hard. But if people in the street keep giving you funny looks, make sure you’re wearing trousers before you start worrying about what colour they are.</blockquote>
- KandanApp kandanapp.com
- Any.DO | Make Things Happen any.do
"We are living in a world of accelerating addictiveness and increasingly I think the only way (likely lonely, squirming, and eccentric as Paul alludes) we'll "get things done" is the continuous directed practice and improvement of willpower, productivity, flow, and exercising thereof."
- Ramblings in Valve Time | Valve blogs.valvesoftware.com
The idea that a 10-person company of 20-somethings in Mesquite, Texas, could get its software on more computers than the largest software company in the world told him that something fundamental had changed about the nature of productivity [...] The success of Doom made it obvious that this was no longer the case. There was now little value in doing the same thing even twice; almost all the value was in performing a valuable creative act for the first time.
- How to Remember Everything, Ever and Forever — Write More Tests writemoretests.com
By condensing the pieces of information you need or want to know in to a piece of software that’s optimizing your learning experience, you can learn more, remember it longer, and remove much of the tedium.
- how to put a virtual machine launcher icon in the dock? (View topic) • virtualbox.org forums.virtualbox.org
Trying to find a nice, quick way to launch VirtualBox images without having to launch VirtualBox itself. "vboxmanage startvm NAMEOFYOURVIRTUALMACHINE"
- Wunderlist | Task Management At Its Best wunderlist.com
A potential replacement for Things.
- Hacker News | Life Hack - The 30/30 Minute Work Cycle Feels Like Magic news.ycombinator.com
Lots of discussions re. ratios.
- The Quantified Self kk.org
Build your own multi-purpose mobile self-tracking application.
- Readability :: Add-ons for Firefox addons.mozilla.org
Ooh, shortcut key! Worth trying just for that.
- Rands In Repose: How to Run a Meeting randsinrepose.com
There are two useful types of meetings: alignment and creation. Briefly, alignment meetings are tactical communication exchanges that rarely dive into the strategic. These are fine meetings that have a weekly cadence, and while there are lots of ways to screw up these meetings, their tactical repetition often keeps them on the rails. Creation meetings — diving into solving a hard problem — involve, well, more creativity. Each hard problem requires a unique solution, and finding that solution is where creation meetings can go bad.
- Discipline: Be The Machine « yield thought coderoom.wordpress.com
Rawr! Be the machine! Another version of "stop faffing about and just get on with it".
- How to Lose Time and Money paulgraham.com
I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day—days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I'd feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV I'd feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It's not fun. So it must be work.
- Divvy · Window management at its finest. mizage.com
"Allows you to quickly and efficiently "divvy up" your screen into exact portions."
- Pivotal Tracker - Free Lightweight Agile Project Management & Team Collaboration, from Pivotal Labs pivotaltracker.com
Agile project management tool that enables real time collaboration around a shared, prioritized backlog.
- Meet With Approval meetwithapproval.com
Arrange a meeting or event. Work out which day is good for everyone and keep track of who is coming
- Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money | Software by Rob softwarebyrob.com
More money isn't one of them.
- Irradiated Software - SizeUp irradiatedsoftware.com
Allows you to quickly position a window to fill exactly half the screen (splitscreen), a quarter of the screen (quadrant), full screen, or centered via the menu bar or configurable system-wide shortcuts (hotkeys).
- Alex Payne — Don't Be A Hero al3x.net
Heroes are damaging to a team because they become a crutch. As soon as you have someone who’s always willing to work at all hours, the motivation from the rest of the team to produce reliable, trouble-free software drops. The hero is a human patch.
- Redmine - Overview - Redmine redmine.org
A RoR Trac clone.
- Continuous Integration martinfowler.com
A quick [!] overview of Continuous Integration summarizing the technique and its current usage.
- Technical Debt - 10x Software Development blogs.construx.com
The reason most often cited by technical staff for avoiding debt altogether is the challenge of communicating the existence of technical debt to business staff and the challenge of helping business staff remember the implications of the technical debt that has previously been incurred. Everyone agrees that it's a good idea to incur debt late in a release cycle, but business staff can sometimes resist accounting for the time needed to pay off the debt on the next release cycle. The main issue seems to be that, unlike financial debt, technical debt is much less visible, and so people have an easier time ignoring it.
- LaunchBar 5 obdev.at
It's probably about time to replace Quicksilver. This looks like a decent alternative.
- Write HTML and CSS quicker with with Zen Coding | 456 Berea Street 456bereastreet.com
Zen Coding lets you use syntax that looks very much like CSS selectors to write HTML