Cooking for the Creative Beast (11)
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Guest post Guest blogger, Matt Wood, learns how to feed his creative side (without giving it a big gut). —mdm Earlier this summer, I was in the kitchen, trying to cook dinner. I had a pot on the stove and a fire going on the grill outside. I was fumbling with a bag of frozen peas when my three-year-old started shouting at me to fix one of his toys. “Hold on a second, son,” I ...
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Jinny Koh said:
I suffer from too-many-pots-on-stove syndrome...
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Goldie Katsu said:
Reminds me of a comment that Len Edgerly made when presenting at our podcaster's meetup. He said he was inspired by a poet (who's name I've forgotten) who told his students to write a poem a day. A student said they couldn't do that. He told them "Lower your standards." Sometimes doing is the point.
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Gangles said:
This justifies why I read so many RSS feeds... at least that's what I tell myself ._.
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Derek Morrison said:
Mentions practicing under less than ideal conditions, commonly.
Task Times, The Planning Fallacy, and a Magical 20% (28)
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Overcoming Bias: Planning Fallacy Via The Guardian, via Chairman Gruber, comes this post from the new-to-me blog, Overcoming Bias. It discusses the research behind a common cognitive bias known as The Planning Fallacy, which is a repeatable, documented error in thinking that apparently explains why we all tend to “underestimate task-completion times.” It’s summed up nicely by Gödel, Escher, Bach author Douglas Hofstadter’s Law regarding the time it takes to do anything: It always takes ...
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Alex said:
Spot on Merlin. Spot on.
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Jumpy said:
Yep, I concur.
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meta said:
I've always been pretty good at predicting project completion dates, apparently because I give it very little thought.
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Aaron said:
The number one issue I have in my job is estimating. I tend to agree with the article, but the 20% isn't hard and fast - everyone needs to learn their "estimating factor" and apply it to all of their estimates. Mine's somewhere around a 2.
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Ricky said:
Good idea.
Foo for Bar: Kicking Ass with Outcome-Based Thinking (48)
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The other day, I was talking with someone who is trying to encourage a Getting Things Done-like work approach amongst the people on his team. We started talking about which parts of David Allen’s GTD system appear to have the greatest long-term impact on the people who have adopted it and who ultimately stick with it for years. When asked to distill everything down to its most powerful concepts, I came up with three, and ...
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Ben said:
I currently love the first two. Need to work on the 3rd.
Making Time to Make: One Clear Line (40)
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This article is Part 3 of a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work called, Making Time to Make. Previously: Part 1, Bad Correspondence Then: Part 2, The Job You Think You Have Could an email recluse like Neal Stephenson just cowboy up by agreeing to a monthly chat session or the occasional visit to a fan forum? Sure, he could. Could a volunteer intern scan Neal’s email once a week ...
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Ryan said:
how to manage wasting time! Merlin Mann on making time to make
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Ryan said:
Wow, there are so many quotables and take-aways from this I'll have to come back and read it a few more times. When Merlin connects, he generally goes yard with it.
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colleen wainwright said:
How to accomplish the work of Work. Part 3 of an excellent series.
Making Time to Make: The Job You Think You Have (37)
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This article is Part 2 from a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work called, Making Time to Make. Previously: Part 1, Bad Correspondence Next: Part 3, A Clear Line If you’re a publisher, journalist, author, blogger, musician, artist, designer, cartoonist, or any other sort of person whose job it is to connect with people by communicating ideas, it’s natural and wholesome for people who are interested in what you do ...
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blackunicorn said:
so true...I think I'm an illustrator but since working on developing snooglezoo.com I feel more like a forum manager
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Casey said:
"Put plainer, my sense is that western culture would be a damn sight poorer today if John Lennon had been forced to carry a goddamn BlackBerry."
Delicious.com Relaunches with 1,000-Character Notes Fields (36)
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Oh happy day — the new Delicious is here In the years since del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo! it’s been hard to get why it remained such a red-headed stepchild. Despite an unbelievable lead in both mindshare, functionality, and ease-of-use (yeah, it’s been my preferred bookmarker for years), del.icio.us seemed to sit there while a dozen social bookmarking sites lapped it with fancier designs and (mostly superfluous) new features. Yay, Yahoo. Today Y! revealed a ...
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Chris said:
This is awesome.
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Picketwire said:
Merlin on the best part of the new Delicious.com--1,000 character notes fields. To my minds,this makes del.icio.us a self-contained linkblog platform.
aTV Update Gives AppleTV FTP and USB Drive Support (31)
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aTV Flash - Ver. 3.2 - Apple Core, LLC The 3.2 version of Apple Core’s patchstick for the AppleTV is out. And it’s pretty amazing. If you’ve never heard of the aTV, I’ll point you to the product page for all the feature details that turn your AppleTV into a tricked-out media center that runs an assload of codecs without PiTa transcoding. And, yes, you will need to read the detailed instructions on how to ...
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Mark said:
Hmmmm...maybe a good alternative to putting the mini in the bedroom...
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James said:
I want an AppleTV now.
[EMAIL] On Peanut Shells and Email Archiving (44)
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Real Estate Connect San Francisco 2008 | Inman News Later this morning, I’m honored to be delivering the keynote address at the Inman Real Estate Connect conference here in San Francisco — coincidentally, a conference I attended in 2000 as the “Senior Producer” (whatever that means) for the real estate dotcom I was working for. I’ll be doing my Inbox Zero talk and touching on some of the ways that real estate agents can use ...
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Kyle A Koch said:
I like this quote: Once you eat the peanut, the job of the shell is done. So lose it. Ditto dead email. Never organize what you can simply discard; and if you can’t discard it, throw it onto one big pile." I think this can be applied to most things in life.
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kirsty said:
"Never organize what you can simply discard" - good lesson for non email too! (though the "throw it in one big pile" doesn't work for other things so well.)
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Derick Valadao said:
Cool article. I love the inbox zero mentality and practice it to some extent (even though it's really easy given the relatively few email I get).
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Ian said:
"Never organize what you can simply discard."
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Sean said:
reiterates nicely the importance of the delete key when managing e-mail.
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Jim said:
Time to empty out my GMail Inbox. Once again, Merlin Mann provides the impetus.
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Todd Mundt said:
Merlin on old email: The idea here is that you probably don’t have a place in your home or office where you store the shells from every peanut you ever ate. If you did, you’d definitely want to organize them by the year in which you ate them, perhaps keeping separate jars per-month or per-location where you ate the nut. You know. For posterity.
DHH on iPhone 2.0's Glitches (20)
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iPhone 2.0: The glory wore off in wash - (37signals) [via DF] While acknowledging the complexity of Apple’s ambitious launch, David Heinemeier Hansson says iPhone 2.0 wasn’t ready for prime time on a number of levels. Combined, it???s a rather big disappointment. I???m surprised just how much impact the small griefs have when they add up to a lack of confidence in the system. It???s a great example of the cumulative effects of problems. They ...
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nyenyec said:
Reading this makes me feel better about not getting an iPhone. :)
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Terence Lo said:
all this from the device all the analysts are saying will put RIM out of business. easy there tiger. let's not make bold stupid predictions now.
Tracking Down the "Embarrassing Memory" Noise (8)
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Compelled to Blurt… | Ask Metafilter Like a lot of people in this Ask Metafilter thread, I thought I was the only person in the universe who made an unconscious little noise when remembering something stupid I did or said. It’s not especially loud, in fact it’s often under my breath. The sound is usually just a quiet grunt, or a word/syllable or two. If I remember an embarrassing conversation, I tend to blurt out ...
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Diane said:
Wow - I'm not insane after all!
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Ryan said:
Thought I was the only one walking around talking to myself all day.
