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.