“What do all the words mean?” Asking that is a very powerful way to start working on a document that Product or Engineering requested, but for which they provided little more than a headline: “We need a document explaining how to cook fish in an office microwave”. What do all the words mean? Then continue […]
The Oatmeal’s ten year anniversary Creativity comic isn’t just for artists – pretty much anyone in tech can learn something valuable from it.
Whether your colleagues just got laid off or are worried they’ll be next, there are ways you can help – even if you don’t have a job to offer them. All of these things can help people feel prepared and in control, and can reduce anxiety. That’s about all you can do, since you can’t […]
Sometimes the reason you can’t focus on a task is that it’s just not interesting. However good you are at managing your attention, the bottom line is that some things are so painfully boring that your brain hitches up its skirts and walks away. You can muscle through the boredom – not everything in life […]
Half of what I read about procrastination, focus, and productivity seems to ignore what for me has always been the prime driver of procrastination: fear. The unfearing view of procrastination focuses on perfectly reasonable advice, some of which I also give, which helps alleviate some symptoms. But the best way to beat fear-based procrastination is […]
There is a line in Atomic Habits that I really like: “I’m just proactively lazy. It gives you so much time back”. It refers to resetting a room after every use so that it’s ready the next time you want to use it. I like to apply it to my work computer, and I am […]
In a post titled Find It in the Edit, I mentioned that your first draft is going to suck, and that seven drafts into the writing process is halfway there. I was making a point about the importance of editing. But I should have made another point: “The suck is normal. It’s almost requisite. Embrace […]
One of the most popular posts on this blog is the one where I suggest foregoing consistency when using (or not) the oxford comma in UI. Did I really suggest punctuating inconsistently? Yes. Yes, I did. Readers don’t care about your company’s consistency; they care about clarity. With vocabulary, being inconsistent is a great way […]
When breaking a large project into tasks, there are better and worse ways to go about it. A pretty bad start is picking tasks that are the wrong size – they’re still too big, and require further breakdown. So what’s a good size for a task, and how can your own description of a task […]
Cal Newport writes for the New Yorker about Slack’s optimisation of the ills of rapid, unending email communication: “The problem with this trajectory is that no one stopped to ask if it made sense to optimize this style of work in the first place. […] We both love and hate Slack because this company built […]
Tested Writing 
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