I love this idea to schedule your “Uh Oh” moments:

Have you ever had a moment where you look at the state of your work and feel, "uh oh, I'm already halfway through my timeline, and I haven't made as much progress as I should have"?

These are your "uh oh" moments.

The workdays of so many professionals are dictated by urgencies and emergencies.

But there is another way to work, which I call ‘Calm productivity’. This is a major paradigm shift, which not many organisations are willing or able to make.

We can build slack into our lives. We can create cycles so that we don’t need to dance with a crisis around time on a regular basis.

This hit me at just the right moment as this morning I was thinking I should keep more in touch with my friends. I already texted one of them to get together for lunch next week. Thanks @Patrickrhone!

So that has me thinking a lot about friendships – especially amongst guys. We tend not to prioritize them. We tend to think that to get together there has to be a reason involved. We have to have an event or some purpose to it. A run or a round of golf. Making a batch of beer or building a deck. Or we need to get the families together, let our partners talk and kids play. Dinner or a barbecue. Often, we guys never seem to think of getting together “just because”. For no reason at all other than to connect. Have a chit chat about anything under the sun. Or, sit in silence together and just be.

Give yourself permission to be human.

• It can be easy to consider a temporary habit a "failure" because it wasn't permanent, but a temporary habit can still add value to one's life.
• Temporarily doing an activity every day can help one decide if that activity really reflects their desires and priorities.
• A temporary habit can help someone build a skill, even if it doesn't need to be continued long-term to retain the skill.

So true:

Productivity was once about time management. Increasingly it is about distraction management.

The only thing you should manage are your intentions.

I never understood the appeal of the digital nomad lifestyle. Sure, it’s cool for about a week, but after that it gets really uncomfortable.

As Oliver Burkeman explained exquisitely in his book ‘Four thousand weeks’, it is a lifestyle fueled by egoism.

If you’re thinking about taking off for far-flung locations so you can keep your job while seeing the world, think of this as a checklist of things to prepare for—and a warning that it won’t be as glamorous as you may imagine.

With al this attention for creating an external brain (David Allen) and building a second brain (Tiago Forte), we might forget this:

But it’s also important to practice holding things in mind. That’s how we exercise the brain, folding ideas into our intrinsic memory and rebuilding them when they go awry.

Nir argues that Time blocking can be useful for everybody, as long as you use it for Reflective Work (and not for Reactive Work), start small (maybe with a 15 minute block) and try to use it also for fun activities.

When you timebox fun, you’ll see what true leisure feels like, unencumbered by the nagging feeling that you should be doing something else.

There are so many good ideas in this post, but this is my favourite:

34 Go for a walk without your phone.

Follow Seth’s advice and avoid dong things at the last moment whenever possible. You don’t want to have to deal with Murphy’s Law.

The last minute is an easy habit to fall into. Once you start focusing on crises, it makes it really difficult to find the focus and energy to begin planning ahead. But the last minute can be risky and expensive.