Productivity porn It’s like a finger pointing at the moon. Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all of the heavenly glory!— Bruce Lee. The internet is full of productivity tips and techniques, more accurately known as productivity porn. And I plead guilty. I’ve learned a few things the hard way that are not often mentioned. If you really deeply care about something, you will do it. So what do you need a system for? Do not confuse activity for progress. Performance Artist Kalup Linzy and the Art of Being a Character Kirsten Luce for The New York Times The performance artist Kalup Linzy at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery. His animation, back left, was on display. Amid the swans nervously clutching a glass of white wine was the show’s unlikeliest darling, a black Southern-inflected, gender-bending, genre-defying video-and-performance artist named Kalup Linzy. Instead of the bad wigs or skimpy dresses that his characters are known for, Mr. Linzy looked positively demure in a beige henley T-shirt and sneakers. “I bought these on clearance at a department store in Union Square,” Mr. It was hard to know if Mr. The characters, many played by Mr. “He’s a multifaceted artist who’s become a recognizable figure on the contemporary New York art scene in only a few years,” said Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1 in Queens, which has given Mr. Mr. As his fame rose, so did the company he kept. The two met in 2009 at , at a party honoring Mr. It was one of the oddest art pairings in recent memory.
Developing Razor Sharp Focus with Zen Habits Blogger, Leo Babauta If you’ve just logged into Facebook or your email for the 10th time today or find yourself thinking in Facebook statuses throughout the day, it may be time to read Leo Babauta’s eBook “Focus: A simplicity manifesto in the age of distraction”. This free eBook contains dozens of practical suggestions to help you enjoy life more, enhance your creativity and get things done. If there ever was an equivalent of steroids for focus, this book is it – it’s a great tool to help anyone develop razor sharp focus and churn out quality work. After reading this book, I made a number of changes that dramatically sharpened my focus. I have summarised a number of the strategies in the mind map below. Create Focus Rituals/Habits: Babauta defines a ritual as a set of actions you repeat habitually. He argues that rituals can help us to get into a focused mindset and suggests a number of rituals for the morning, before you begin your work, to help you refocus on your work and for the end of the day.
businessinsider Books suck. No question about it, almost everyone who writes a book is a crappy writer. And this is a good thing. It's because the writer spent his life getting GOOD at what he was writing about. He didn't spend his life being good at writing. He didn't spend his life typing. He or She DID something. But that's ok. I like reading billion-person books. I like reading books where I feel my brain have an IQ orgasm. And, (please let me stick with this metaphor one more sentence), I might have a little brain-child that turns into my own special idea or book after reading a great book. Before I give my list, I want to mention there are three kinds of non-fiction books: (and I'm only dealing with non-fiction. These are books like "How to be a leader". They establish the author as an expert. These books usually suck. In fact, writing one might be desperately important to your career. A publisher will see an article somewhere like, "12 ways to become smarter" and say, "that should be a book".
Practice your personal Kaizen A fine article. But as a resident of Japan who's spent over half his life speaking Japanese, let me take this chance to address one common myth. "Kaizen" in Japanese does NOT mean "continual improvement", or have any mystical managerial significance. It's a mundane, generic word meaning "improvement" - any improvement, continual or not. (An aside: Leading Japanese companies like Toyota make continual improvement a core practice. Toyota and some of its contemporaries have indeed developed advanced, powerful methods for continuous operational improvement, within the context of their industries. Of course, if modern management gurus in the US (or wherever) want to latch on to the word "kaizen" as the new name for "continuous improvement", they're welcome to do so; words gain new meanings all the time.
The Mini Maggie System -- Honey, I shrunk the speakers! Photo Credit: Magnapan It's been rumored about for ages, played at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas a couple of years ago, but sometime in September Magnepan will begin shipping the Mini Maggie System ($1,495). It's a desktop speaker system, albeit one designed to satisfy the most demanding audiophile tastes. I visited the Magnepan factory in White Bear Lake, Minnesota in late July to spend some quality time with the Mini Maggies. The Magnapan 3.7 speaker. Magnepan was founded in the late 1960s, making it one of America's oldest high-end speaker companies. Photo Credit: Steve Guttenberg Wendell had the Mini Maggie System setup with a modified Denon DVD 3910 SACD/DVD-Audio player, Audio Research LS-1 line stage preamp, and a Threshold S/550 power amp. The Mini may be a scaled down 3.7, but it actually sounds better than a 3.7 in a number of ways. The Mini-Maggie System is a three-piece affair; it comes with two satellite speakers and a DWM-Maggie woofer panel.
Top 10 Ways to Declutter Your Digital Life, 2010 Edition After I built the new computer last weekend I decided to take the larger of the two hard drives out of the old one to put in an external enclosure for backup purposes. This forced me to take a good look at what was on that drive. No, I did not need a backup of my entire iTunes music collection from a year and a half ago, and duplicate backups of my photos. There was also a huge mass of accumulated WordPress files of various kinds (plugins, themes, old versions of WordPress) that I mostly did not need to keep around. So last night I went through folder by folder and deleted the stuff I didn't need to keep and zipped up the rest. I do still need to declutter the top of my desk, which is turning into tchotchke heaven.
Why You Get More Done When You Gamify Your Life As a kid playing games, you didn’t stay up for hours because of the music, the graphics, or the storyline. Rather, it was because the games were so difficult that any kind of achievement was a massive deal for your 8-year-old self. As an adult, these basic lessons still ring true: difficulty doesn’t put you off if it’s supplemented with rewards. “Difficult” can mean mentally demanding, or even just arduous (as you’ve undoubtedly experienced after spending six hours on the same darn spreadsheet). In fact, you probably already have tried to gamify your life, that is, you’ve made games out of boring activities to pass the time. How To Gamify Your Life Gamification is turning a task into a game to motivate yourself to do it. “We evolved to be satisfied by the world in different ways […] As intelligent beings, we’re enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning,” says Tom Chatfield in his explanation of gamification for TED. So, let’s say you’re low on milk. The first is Habitica.
15 Bad Habits Which Always Destroy Your Productivity Do you feel as if your productivity levels are at an all time low? Do you find it more and more difficult to complete work in a timely, and efficient fashion? You might be sabotaging your productivity without even realizing it. Avoid these 15 bad habits and you’ll give your productivity a much-needed boost! 1. You take too much time to complete a simple task. Taking six hours to write a simple, one-page e-mail really isn’t the best use of your time. 2. There will be times when you just can’t complete your work in a timely fashion. 3. Do you stare at your schedule, thinking about how best to use every last minute of your day? 4. Quick, when was the last time you left your desk for a break? 5. You need food – and water – to survive. 6. Is there an app on your phone, tablet or computer that you absolutely despise? 7. When’s the perfect moment to start planning your dream vacation, clean out your closet or look for that new job? 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
How many Americans die from racial segregation? About 176,000 a year. | [ EpiAnalysis ] We often hear that poverty and inequality contribute to poor health, but how much difference do they actually make? More than smoking? Less than fast food? Over the past few weeks, three landmark papers have emerged that actually quantify how much social factors affect the health of Americans. The mechanisms explaining why neighborhood social factors contribute to ill health are often called “complex and difficult to individually isolate”; how can we truly tell that a heart attack resulted from being pushed out to a semi-industrial neighborhood without access to a doctor or a quality grocery store? Calculating the PAF In 1993, two researchers at the U.S. A few weeks ago, researchers at Columbia University zoomed out further: they recognized that alcohol, tobacco, and similar social pathologies are strongly related to the types of neighborhoods and families that people live around. How does that compute in the grand scheme of things? Calculating the bottom line Seems obvious, no?
Less Doing - Automate your life. Do less. Live more. uk.businessinsider Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design/flickr Tapping your productivity in ways you never have before takes unconventional thinking. Reaching optimal productivity is about working smarter, not harder, and making the most of each day. The following TED talks offer valuable lessons in doing just that. Adam Grant's 'The surprising habits of original thinkers' If fear of failure is stopping you from producing more ideas, Grant, a Wharton professor and author of "Originals," has some inspiration for you. "The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they're the ones who try the most," he says. According to Grant — who has studied many of the greats — churning out tons of ideas, even bad ones, is the key to successfully launching a game-changing idea. Shawn Achor's 'The happy secret to better work' He suggests the common belief that we should work to be happy is misguided, and instead happiness inspires productivity. Nilofer Merchant's 'Got a meeting?