Jorge Arango

Great op/ed article in today’s NY Times on the experiential nature of time:

The quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions.

Some good explanations there for the “time flies when you’re having fun” phenomenon.

Continue Reading

Another great, spot-on essay by Paul Graham:

I first realized the worthlessness of stuff when I lived in Italy for a year. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff. The rest of my stuff I left in my landlady’s attic back in the US. And you know what? All I missed were some of the books. By the end of the year I couldn’t even remember what else I had stored in that attic.

I’d like my home to be almost totally empty, with only a few top-quality items. In order to do this, over the past couple of years I’ve been trying to abide by this principle: everything new that enters my life must replace something else. For example, if I get a new shirt as a gift, I must look for a shirt in my closet to donate to charity. It’s not something I mangage to do in every instance, but still a good habit to cultivate.

Continue Reading

I’m loving Zen Habits, a productivity blog chock-full with great tips on how to cultivate positive habits. Today: 52 Tips for Happiness and Productivity.

Continue Reading

Ira Glass hosts a great radio show in the US called This American Life (check out the podcast) that presents real stories culled from regular Americans. He is a master storyteller, with a great sense of how to find the right structure and details to make almost any tale engaging.

Your Daily Awesome points to a sequence of interviews with Glass discussing the art of storytelling. All of them are worth checking out, but segment #2 (“On finding great stories”) resonated with me. In it, Glass says that he and his team reject between a third and a half of all the story leads they work on. There comes a point in the process, he says, when they realize that the story just isn’t working. Then, it is time to…

… be the ambitious, super-achieving person who you’re gonna be, and kill it. It’s time to kill! And it’s time to enjoy the killing, because by killing you will make something else even better live… Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

Anyone who becomes successful in producing any type of cultural artifact, be it radio stories, paintings, books, or websites, will eventually find him or herself confronted with the fact that he or she has too much going on, and that at least some of it is crap.

Can we muster the courage to abandon the things that aren’t working?

I’m frequently called on to make decisions about the projects my team will be working on. BootStudio is a small agency, so we don’t have unlimited resources to devote to all the projects we get invited to bid on. Additionally, taking on the “wrong” project (one that we don’t have the resources or skills for, or one for a client who doesn’t have the budget or necessary infrastructure) could lead a small team like ours into trouble.

Knowing which opportunities to “kill” is a big part of my job, and it often comes down to intangible decision points. Are we the right people for this job? Do these folks give us the “right vibes”? Does it look like we can communicate well? Are they being clear on what they need and what they expect from us?

I hate to pass up on potential work (and I don’t consider any request for our services to be “crap”), but when I do, I always think that killing this particular opportunity may free us up to work on other projects where we can do a better job and perhaps add more value.

Here’s the entire segment:

Continue Reading

As I’m sure you’ve heard, the next version of OS X—Leopard—was presented today at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. There are some exciting new features in the new OS, including a great-looking backup app (Time Machine). However, I’m particularly excited about the new version of Mail.app.

Why? Because this new version of Mail includes two features that are particularly interesting to a personal productivity dweeb like myself: Notes and To Dos.
-more->
Notes are special messages that show up in your inbox and in a special Notes folder. They seem fairly similar to Notes in Entourage (my current organization app), except for the “showing up in the inbox” bit. (And, as usual with Apple products, looking much better.)

To Dos, on the other hand, seem much more interesting. You can select any text clip or email message and turn it into a To Do, which stays in the context of the note it was created in—in addition to showing up in a dedicated To Do list view. This is cool; it seems very similar to the way I work when taking notes or brainstorming on paper. In addition, there is a single systemwide To Do database (much like addresses in Addressbook), so To Dos can be shared with other apps (eg. iCal).

If these are services provided by the OS itself (as the Leopard keynote presentation seems to imply), the possibilities for GTD-style organization are huge. For example, I’d love to be able to select an item in OmniOutliner or Textmate and turn it into a To Do, while keeping it in context. This seems feasible using this new feature.

I’m excited about this… if this is in fact how the new To Dos work, Leopard may prove to be the ultimate GTD OS.