Yesterday’s post about useful iPad apps for students stirred up lots of interesting discussion, including debates over whether a tablet was a better choice for a student than a notebook PC. But there’s one thread in the conversation I do take issue with: the idea that you shouldn’t have any form of technology at a lecture, because you’ll only get distracted. More »
Author Clay Johnson finished his new book, The Information Diet, after a month of intense focus. The “super secret weapon” that got him to done? Slow bandwidth. More »
When we procrastinate, we’re simply making excuses to ourselves to justify why we’re not going to do what we need to do. CD Baby founder and human encyclopedia of useful life lessons Derek Sivers has a handy hack: just alter the language of your excuses by replacing “and” with “or”. More »
When I did the NaNoWriMo challenge last year, I found that I didn’t benefit much from specialised writing tools. But if you need an incentive to keep pumping out words, Written Kitten might do the trick. For every 100 words you type, you get a fresh picture of a cat. More »
I suck at Photoshop. For years, I’ve posted ugly images alongside Lifehacker posts because I’m not a designer, and whenever I put a little effort into composing an image to go along with a post, it never magically looked incredible. The reality: I was lazy. I may never be Massimo Vignelli, but that doesn’t mean I should remain a design idiot my entire life. More »
Developer Jakub Stastny had a problem with organising his day for ages. Never-ending TODO lists led to frustration and consequently to procrastination; exhaustion from context switching; the feeling that he wasn’t accomplishing anything. A few weeks ago he had a breakthrough, and he calls it the 3 + 2 rule. More »
