One of the things I find hardest at work is resetting if my morning didn’t go at all as planned; if rather than getting stuck into my planned, focused work I ended up running around like a headless chicken, trying to clear multiple small things that kept popping up like moles in a whack-a game. […]
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, to alleviate some symptoms. But the best way to beat fear-based procrastination is to […]
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 […]
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 […]
You know that moment in the shower when you suddenly get an excellent idea? That happens when your brain, working away quietly while you’re talking to yourself about what could possibly have compelled you to buy shower gel that smells like a food item, suddenly connects two dots. We say that things just clicked, or […]
So here we are, at the end of our attention span, and I guess it’s time to address the elephant in the room: productivity. I’m not a huge fan of productivity talk. It always feels rushed, stressful, and focused on quantity over quality. Focusing on attention feels like the exact opposite: The goal is to […]
Research notes. A bombastic name for what is usually a bunch of half formed thoughts and snatches of typos. But you know what I mean. Why am I talking about research notes? Because, at least for me, messy notes – especially if they’re physically scattered among multiple sources (notebook, bits of paper, several different files) […]
Tested Writing 
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