EtherPad: Realtime Collaborative Text Editing HOWTO: Be more productive Translations: 日本語 | Русский | Беларуская “With all the time you spend watching TV,” he tells me, “you could have written a novel by now.” It’s hard to disagree with the sentiment — writing a novel is undoubtedly a better use of time than watching TV — but what about the hidden assumption? Such comments imply that time is “fungible” — that time spent watching TV can just as easily be spent writing a novel. And sadly, that’s just not the case. Time has various levels of quality. If you want to be more productive then, you have to recognize this fact and deal with it. Spend time efficiently Choose good problems Life is short (or so I’m told) so why waste it doing something dumb? This isn’t to say that all your time should be spent on the most important problem in the world. Have a bunch of them Another common myth is that you’ll get more done if you pick one problem and focus on it exclusively. Having a lot of different projects gives you work for different qualities of time. Make a list Notes
25 To Do Lists to Stay Productive I come across many services a day while researching for Solution Watch, and as many of you know, I take a lot of notes to organize my thoughts about them. Until recently, the only method that I used to keep organized with the services I wanted to write about was by reviewing my notes and email, then selecting one from the list. Now, I’ve learned to review all my notes at the end of the day and add each service that I would like to review to an organized to do list. The problem I was having was that I would write all these notes, but I wouldn’t always get to writing about the services I wanted because sometimes I simply forgot (A Not-To-Do List) or the service got carried to the bottom of my notes archive. I then started to use a to do list and now I am much more organized and every day open my to do list and get a clear overview of what’s on my plate to review. All products are clearly listed all with open check-boxes waiting for me to check them off. More Online To Do Lists: To Do Lists
You Can’t Multitask I can only think about one thing at a time. Any girl reading this just going to roll her eyes and think, “Of course. You’re a guy!”. But it’s not just true for me, it’s true for everyone. And not in that way. At first, this claim can sound fantastic. In both cases the extreme situation frustrates your habits and forces you to actively think about what you are doing at the expense of your other task. Still not convinced? Want another experiment? Software often requires us to actively think about two things at once: like needing to know if the current content of the clipboard is important (when you should be thinking about the edit you want to make), or whether the “predictive” text entry on cell phones has incorrectly guessed the word you want (when you really just want to be writing your message). Not being able to think about two things at once means that we can’t truly “multitask” things that we need to think about. Time for another experiment. What’s the lesson to be learned?
Maker's notebook Thoughts on Google’s 20% time Everybody loves to think one little trick can make their organization transform into a super creative powerhouse. With the rise of Google, no single tactic comes up more in innovation circles than their concept of 20% time. Simply put, employees get 1/5th of their time to work on projects of their own choosing. For the myths of innovation book i spent time studying lots of concepts, models and approaches similar to 20% time, and even talked to a few Google employees about how they see the idea. What follows below hits on most of the erroneous assumptions I’ve heard people make about the concept. Here’s a short report: Google’s 20% time is more of an attitude and culture than a rule. 20% time experiment: Atlassian, a software development shop, just announced a serious 20% time experiment, adopting the idea in their culture and blogging about it as they go.
How to Improve Your Self-Control New research suggests self-control can be improved using abstract reasoning. “It’s all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.” ~Mick Jagger Temptation comes in many forms, often so potent, so animal, that it seems impossible to resist. Eating too much, drinking too much, spending too much or letting the heart rule the head. We get instant messages from deep in the gut that resonate through the mind, trying to dictate our behaviour. One of humanity’s most useful skills, without which advanced civilisations would not exist, is being able to engage our higher cognitive functions, our self-control, to resist these temptations. People, being only human, find the constant battle with basic urges is frequently too great and their self-control buckles. Based on new research, along with studies conducted over the past few decades, Dr Fujita and colleagues have proposed that abstract thinking and psychological distance are particularly important in self-control. 1. 2. 3.
BIF-3: Dan Heath - Think Inside the Box Take a sheet of paper and write down everything you can think of that’s white. You have 15 seconds, go. Done? Good, now take 15 seconds and write down everything that is or could be in your refrigerator that’s white. Finished? Raise your hand if had better luck with the second list. Dan Heath, who co-authored the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die with his brother Chip, started his talk at BIF-3 this afternoon by asking the audience to complete the exercise I described above. We’ve all heard the term “thinking outside of the box,” Heath told the audience. Improv actors, said Heath, have long utilized the benefits of inside the box thinking. Inside the box thinking is found all around business in the form of what Heath called a “high concept pitch.” The box can inform many decisions taking place throughout an organization. “The idea that we need to think out of the box is wrong,” concluded Heath, “instead we should go box shopping.