I use about 90% of these apps and have tried them all. They are all great, hands down excellent.
via Mac.AppStorm.
Sherri for Unclutterer:
When you’re done with something, put it away. Right away. Clutter arises when we take something out, use it for awhile and neglect to return it to its proper home. Remember the Unclutterer’s gospel, “A place for everything, and everything in its place.”
I cannot tell you how amazing this tip is. I was always in awe when I walked into peoples homes and they looked immaculate. Sure they could have just straightened up before they had me over, but I always wanted my home to look that way perpetually.
In our home we have started enacting the above rule, that simple tip took us from spending Saturday afternoons cleaning the condo, to an hour a week doing cleaning. Just putting things back when you are done with them leads to so much less clutter and filth in your home. I cannot recommend this tip enough.
via Unclutterer.
There are days when it seems that I can’t get anything done, I lack the focus I desperately need. When an unproductive day comes along, I choose to write it off. I accept that nothing is getting done and go do something else.
Typically I go to the store, run errands, shop online, play games, read news, anything that I want — just so long as I am doing something. The stillness of staring at a monitor, or a blank page is makes me not want to do something even more. The more I stare, the more paralyzed I become, instead I ditch it. Walk away and do something else.
We can all go and do something else, even if we have bosses. Go to the bathroom, make a copy, chat with a co-worker – anything that gets your mind back into the now. After you have worked to get your mind off the task take a look at it again, with a fresh perspective.
I am a all for stopping with work for the day when I hit a brick wall. I am aware that most people can’t do this, and for those of you who cannot just leave for the day I have a work around: Do busy work.
Busy work is great for days when we hit a wall, it is easy, time consuming, and requires no creativity. When you are stuck, busy work is what you should be turning to. Respond to emails, organize, file, fill out forms, these are all great ways to pass the day. There are tons of things to do and try to help jumpstart your creativity, I prefer to let it flow naturally (when I can). Of course there are times when you don’t have that luxury, but for the times when you can wait, why not do busy work? When we are in a creative zone having to do busy work will kill it, I prefer to try and get all of the busy work done when I am not in a creative zone.
To recap:
- Stop work
- Get your mind off of work
- Take a look with fresh eyes
- If step 3 fails do busy work
Joshua Becker for Zen Habits:
Rabbi Elijah of Vilna once said, “What we create becomes meaningful to us only once we stop creating it and start to think about why we did so.” The implication is clear. We could live lives that produce countless widgets, but we won’t start living until we stop producing and start enjoying. Capture again the lost practice of resting one day each week and start truly living.
via Zen Habits.
Erin @ Unclutterer.com:
People always underestimate the amount of time it will take to do something. Even though I have timed myself enough to know how long it actually takes me to do something, I still think I work faster than I do. We all think this way. In our minds, we have speed of pumas.
via Unclutterer.
From the video:
The right approach is more important than the tool.
via YouTube.
Mark Nichols of MetaLab:
We trust everyone who works with us, and we know well enough that being overbearing and nosey does absolutely nothing for productivity. The irony is that office hours have nothing to do with the individual – it’s about the group, the sum of the parts, and having that group evolve from a bunch of people who know and work with one another into a team that actually wants to talk.
This is in response to how thier office used to work. In short they used to follow this mantra of 37signals, from Jason Fried:
Employees come to the office if and when they feel like it, or else they work from home. I don’t believe in the 40-hour workweek, so we cut all that BS about being somewhere for a certain number of hours. I have no idea how many hours my employees work — I just know they get the work done.
I think this is a discussion that we have not heard the last of, with the younger generation starting to assume more power I think this is going to be a two camp system, one for office hours and one against. Very few will be in the middle.
I don’t know exactly how MetaLab is working the new office hours, but I would assume that everyone needs to be in the office for those 2 hours. This is not a very good idea in my opinion. For one it eliminates the ability to hire people from around the world, taking your potential talent pool from 6 billion to 330 million (if you are in the U.S.).
I might propose office hours where everyone needs to be available on something like Campfire for that time. Let me know your thoughts via Twitter or email.
via MetaLab.
Brett Terpstra for TUAW.com:
Whichever you prefer, if your task manager is one of these, you can now turn emails in Postbox directly into tasks (with a link back to the original message in the notes). It’s not a new concept to Mail.app users, but it’s been something that many people who’ve switched to Postbox (or are thinking about it) have sorely missed.
As state this has always been possible with Mail.app, but it is great to see the integration happening with other apps.
via Postbox adds Things and OmniFocus support.
Scott Belsky:
We lose respect for a leader when he or she fails to acknowledge a mistake. What we want to see in our leaders is a sense of self-awareness and honesty. Personally, I gain confidence when one of my colleagues says, “Gosh, I don’t know what I was thinking, sorry about [fill in the blank].” It makes me feel like the mistake or false assumption is now fully understood and owned. It makes me feel safe.
Make no mistake about it, part of being a productive member of society is owning up to your mistakes.
via The 99 Percent.
Ouno Design:
In 2007 Joan Meyers-Levy, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota, reported that the height of a room’s ceiling affects how people think. She randomly assigned 100 people to a room with either an eight– or 10-foot ceiling and asked participants to group sports from a 10-item list into categories of their own choice. The people who completed the task in the room with taller ceilings came up with more abstract categories, such as “challenging” sports or sports they would like to play, than did those in rooms with shorter ceilings, who offered more concrete groupings, such as the number of participants on a team.
via ouno.
