Don't Break the Chain

The Chokehold of Calendars Meetings may be toxic, but calendars are the superfund sites that allow that toxicity to thrive. All calendars suck. And they all suck in the same way. Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re a battlefield over who owns whose time. In my experience, most people don’t schedule their work. How To Waste Time Properly - Issue 7: Waste Ever since Frederick Winslow Taylor timed the exact number of seconds that Bethlehem Steel workers took to push shovels into a load of iron ore and then draw them out, maximizing time efficiency has been a holy grail of the American workplace. But psychologists and neuroscientists are showing us the limits of this attitude: Wasting time, they say, can make you more creative. Even seemingly meaningless activities such as watching cat videos on YouTube may help you solve math problems. Brent Coker, who studies online behavior at the University of Melbourne in Australia, found that people who engage in “workplace Internet leisure browsing” are about 9 percent more productive than those who don’t.

How to Finish Your Work, One Bite at a Time “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” If you’ve ever ran more than a few miles, you probably understand why you need to pace yourself. Runners that sprint at the start of a race will be exhausted far before they cross the finish line. The same principle applies when trying to get work done. Five Handy Things You Can Do with Google's New Knowledge Graph Search I'm actually finding it pretty handy. I was worried about the condensed search results, but it's okay. I still wish they would let it spread out more on a widescreen monitor. At any rate, for the obvious searches at least, it's nice to have that material right there.

Portrait of an ENTJ As an ENTJ, your primary mode of living is focused externally, where you deal with things rationally and logically. Your secondary mode is internal, where you take things in primarily via your intuition. ENTJs are natural born leaders. They live in a world of possibilities where they see all sorts challenges to be surmounted, and they want to be the ones responsible for surmounting them. They have a drive for leadership, which is well-served by their quickness to grasp complexities, their ability to absorb a large amount of impersonal information, and their quick and decisive judgments. 5 Unusual Ways to Start Working Smarter, Not Harder, Backed by Science One of the things I love about the culture at Buffer is the emphasis on working smarter, not harder. Our team is all about getting plenty of sleep, exercise and recreation time so that our time spent working is as productive as it can be. Working harder can be an easy habit to slip into, though. Sometimes it’s hard to switch off at the end of the day, or to take time out on the weekend and stop thinking about work.

To scan or not to scan, that is the question… Starting on the road to a paperless lifestyle can be a little overwhelming. Of course, there are some tools that can help to make it easier. There are things you can do to better organize your digital documents. The Myth of Multitasking Christine Rosen In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence. “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.” In modern times, hurry, bustle, and agitation have become a regular way of life for many people — so much so that we have embraced a word to describe our efforts to respond to the many pressing demands on our time: multitasking.