Is there something missing on your to do list?

Looking back, there was one chore that I should have put on every list and saved time for every day.

That missing item was "Thinking." 

Some intresting thoughts on intelligence:

The brain is the organ that named itself and created all that we are discussing but it is a odd thing. It takes over 20 years of education before it is even remotely useful to an employer or society. To attribute ‘intelligence’ to he organ is to forge that, compared to machines, it can’t pay attention for long, forgets most of what you teach it, is sexist, racist, full of cognitive biases, sleeps 8 hours a day, can’t network, can’t upload, can’t download and, here’s the fatal objection -  it dies. This should not be the gold standard for intelligence, as it is an idiosyncratic organ that evolved for circumstances other than those we find ourselves in.

Hey is a fantastic email service that is about to get a whole lot better as you can send email to the world which will be published on your personal Hey blog.

When I write a certain kind of email — aka a blog post — why do I have to address it to someone? Why can't I just address my thoughts to the world? Direct to the web for anyone and everyone? Rather than define the recipients, I just write and let the recipients find me.

90% of running a business is making a bunch of tiny improvements that nobody notices but end up being transformative over time.

The personal website seems to making a comeback.

This is the way:

Publish. Consistently. With patience. Own your assets. Don’t let a middleman be your landlord. Yell at Google for blocking your emails and hope it’ll work eventually. Continually push for RSS and an open web. With patience.

This is the basis for a functioning society:

To reduce conflict in our lives, we need to fully accept the truth that other people are not meant to think the same way as we do, since we all have fundamentally different thinking systems, informed by our past experiences, upbringing, education, the things we read, etc.

Michael Wade proposes adding a fifth quadrant to the Eisenhower priority matrix and he calls it Important and Ugh.

You know the characteristics of Important and Ugh: not urgent but so distasteful that an extra effort will be required to trick/nudge/cajole you into tackling it.

WhatsApp’s canary died 😔

Uh-oh. WhatsApp's canary just died; they removed the statement that they never have access to your private keys. If you were using it because of its privacy, it's time to find something else.

Well said:

Discussions of ‘time management’ and ‘productivity’ often hide the real issue.

Soul management.

As usual, effectiveness is a question of habits. Tools come in second place.

So more than the bells and whistles, ask yourself which app feels useful to you. Which one helps you get to what you want? Which one do you feel inspired to write in? Which one feels enjoyable to write in? Which one feels like the initial seeds of a system can be enjoyable to maintain?

Nicholas Base reminds us to be a good gardener:

Although he/she wouldn't be so bold as to proclaim it, the good gardener has stumbled upon a brilliant approach for business, parenting and life.

It seems Seth was listening in on our Zoom call this morning, in which we decided to dedicate the month of January to review our processes and systems.

When will you sharpen the saw?

In any given moment, an urgency that feels like an emergency gives us the permission to abandon our systems and simply dive in and fix it, as only we can. And this permission is precisely why we get stuck, precisely why the next urgency is likely to appear tomorrow.

I love this quote about Serena Williams using Toggl Track:

Cover subject Serena Williams tells senior writer Nicole LaPorte that she uses the app Toggl to help track her time with her daughter, Olympia. Victory, for this athlete-entrepreneur-investor, is when she overindexes on parenting.

We need to be careful to not optimize everything to be efficient. Efficiency is for robots, humans are inefficient.

Discovery, adventure, every single thing that we really value as humans is terribly inefficient.

This sounds like a perfect day to me.

the goal for this day is simple: Calm

More than ever before, we’re using technology to connect with the outside world. And with so many of us now working from home, we’re relying on our phones to stay updated with colleagues and clients. However, when you’re receiving endless Zoom calls and emails, pings on Slack, and notifications from everywhere else, it begins to hinder productivity and focus.

Unexpected? Only if you’re not used to mindful communication.

So true…

Life is slower on paper, and that’s a good thing!

Seth on dates:

One of the most expensive things a service business or freelancer can do is promise that work will be done by a certain day. Which is something we need to do, of course, but we should charge appropriately. “It’ll be done soon,” should be way cheaper than, “It’ll be done at exactly 11 am on Tuesday.”

And one of the most important things we can do to focus our energy and commitment is be prepared to promise a date certain. It sharpens everything.

Seth nailed the essence of a Zoom meeting:

The purpose of a meeting is not to fill the allocated slot on the Google calendar invite. The purpose is to communicate an idea and the emotions that go with it, and to find out what’s missing via engaged conversation.

Messier is better.

For meetings, I have a yellow legal pad and a .5mm rollerball. I used to roll with a .38mm, but the .5 feels way more messy and therefore better.

Productivity is a philosophy.

Influencers make us feel that productivity is important, and yet they rarely define the term, let alone helpfully. For example, David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) book, which became very popular in software circles, uses the term productivity very loosely. Many of the core examples in the GTD method relate to general activities such as cleaning one’s garage as opposed to working with knowledge. And the GTD principles have no reference to cognitive science, even though cognitive science is the modern interdisciplinary science of understanding the information processing we do in our brains, with or without the aid of technology.

Write about the things you practice; practice the things you write about. Words without action is fraudulent. (It’s hard, but I try.)

Professionals don’t need fake deadlines and don’t respect them. Instead, we have the chance to build in appropriate slack, get our priorities straight and keep our promises.