Getting Things Done

"One of the most common and destructive thought habits I have ever encountered is perfectionism. It holds you back from actually getting all the way to done with a lot in life. It may hold you back from even trying to do something because you feel you have to do it perfectly. And it tears your self-esteem apart. So what can you do about it? In today’s article I would like to share 3 of the most effective things that have helped me to replace this habit with something better." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"Don’t let the new year sneak up on you. Now is the perfect time to follow these 5 ways to start the year off right, and take charge of what you are getting out of life." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"Meditation brings many benefits: It refreshes us, helps us settle into what's happening now, makes us wiser and gentler, helps us cope in a world that overloads us with information and communication, and more. But if you're still looking for a business case to justify spending time meditating, try this one: Meditation makes you more productive. How? By increasing your capacity to resist distracting urges." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"IT'S 5 p.m. at the office. Working fast, you've finished your tasks for the day and want to go home. But none of your colleagues have left yet, so you stay another hour or two, surfing the Web and reading your e-mails again, so you don't come off as a slacker. It's an unfortunate reality that efficiency often goes unrewarded in the workplace. I had that feeling a lot when I was a partner in a Washington law firm. Because of my expertise, I could often answer a client's questions quickly, saving both of us time. But because my firm billed by the hour, as most law firms do, my efficiency worked against me." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"By applying an industrial-age mind-set to 21st-century professionals, many organizations are undermining incentives for workers to be efficient. If employees need to stay late in order to curry favor with the boss, what motivation do they have to get work done during normal business hours? After all, they can put in the requisite "face time" whether they are surfing the Internet or... more... - imabonehead

"In the software world, heavy sprints are used to reach milestones by particular dates and keep things from drawing out. They are designed to get a lot of work done very quickly – but when they drag on for months on end, they become a problem by contributing to low morale and high attrition. In other words, when they are not accompanied by a culture that shows care for employees, people tend to get pissed off and leave." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

Found out another person is leaving today. Just posted the link to Twitter. Will be interesting to see if anyone says anything. It's sad that the points in the article seem to be common sense yet aren't done. - Tamara from iPhone

"No matter how many books get bought on Time Management, it’s a simple fact of life that we get tired and work gets a lot more difficult. So how can we be productive when dog-tired? As Philip Pullman once said – “A bad day’s work is a lot better than no day’s work at all”. So here are my ten tired, tried and tested ideas..." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"Some people are incredibly effective and efficient. They get lots of work done – and it’s all high-quality. They seem to have boundless energy and enthusiasm. Maybe you’ve got a friend who’s like that – or perhaps it’s your colleague, or your spouse. You might think that they were born that way: they had the “productivity gene.” The truth is this: you can massively increase your own productivity by understanding and using the secrets that highly productive people know." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"Devised by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s, the pomodoro technique gathered many followers. The popularity of this time management method lies in its simplicity: work on a single task for 25 minutes and then take a 5-minute break. After four 25-minute sessions, take a 15-minute break. Not exactly rocket science." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"We all have our weekday morning routines. You roll into the office a little before 9 am (or a little after, if traffic was really bad), settle in at your desk, maybe grab a cup of coffee around 9:30 or 10, check Twitter and Facebook, and then dive in to your inbox. And while it’s obvious that your time playing Farmville or reading Kanye’s latest tweet is going to hamper your productivity, you might be surprised to learn what other common work habits can sabotage your productivity." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"The 10,000-hour concept, though, is based on academic research into the idea that success is a choice — made, not born. At first glance, it feels like a very American idea — you can be anything you want to be — but it is an unsentimental view of the world. It helps to be tall in basketball, and it helps to start violin lessons at a young age, but what separates the few truly great from the many merely good is not talent or magic or luck. It's dedication and discipline. The secret to success isn't a secret. It's work." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"Ever come up with a great idea for someone else, but find yourself stymied by your own problem? Recent research by Evan Polman of NYU and Kyle J. Emich of Cornell may shed some light on why. In three sets of experiments, they found that when people solved problems on behalf of others, they produced faster and more creative solutions than they did when they solved the same problems for themselves." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"Famous visionaries often develop a reputation for having a few eccentricities. However, for many people, these small eccentricities are part of a larger group of daily rituals that help them to be at their most productive and prolific. While not all these tips, tricks, and rituals will work for you, they help to shed light on what some of our most beloved cultural icons and historical figures are willing to do in order to stay on top of their demanding workloads." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"I confess to being as prone to the distractions of the Internet as anyone else: I will start reading about something that interests me and disappear down the rabbit hole for hours (even days) at a time. But my ability to focus on a single task has dramatically improved, and that one habit has changed my life." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"The more employees your company has, the less productive each of these employees are. It is a generalization, of course, but a useful one and one that is confirmed by most people who have worked for growing organizations. As the company grows, so does the internal processes and the layers of bureaucracy, and the time spent on communications grows rapidly. It is, however, useful to look at the actual numbers. How much does productivity decrease as the organization grows? The answers are frankly frighting." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"Work-life balance, says Nigel Marsh, is too important to be left in the hands of your employer. At TEDxSydney, Marsh lays out an ideal day balanced between family time, personal time and productivity -- and offers some stirring encouragement to make it happen." - imabonehead

"I spend a lot of time thinking about how to learn faster. The biggest reason I do this is because it’s important. With so much knowledge out there, the answers to most of our biggest problems are out there, but they’re useless if we don’t understand them. People who can grok hard subjects and big ideas will earn more money, live better and have a bigger impact on the world. Learning matters—a lot." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"My answer was equally simple: Smart people don’t need to memorize, because they connect ideas together." - imabonehead

"Microsoft Mathematics 4.0 includes a full-featured graphing calculator. It’s designed to work just like those expensive handheld calculators and it’s optimized for algebra, trigonometry, statistics, and calculus. Additional math tools help you solve systems of equations, evaluate sides and angles in a triangle, and convert from one system of units to another. It also has a quick reference library of formulas commonly used in mathematics, chemistry, and physics." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

So So sorry TI. ( not really) - Melanie Reed

"Based on over a half-century of cognitive science and more recent studies on multitasking, we know that multitaskers do less and miss information. It takes time (an average of 15 minutes) to re-orient to a primary task after a distraction such as an email. Efficiency can drop by as much as 40%. Long-term memory suffers and creativity — a skill associated with keeping in mind multiple, less common, associations — is reduced." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"Technological demands are here to stay. What can you do to avoid overload?..." - imabonehead

"Each of these attempts at motivation backfired. Many people (but clearly not all) know that rewards and other extrinsic motivators aren’t effective; in fact, they often diminish intrinsic motivation. And making one person the winner makes other people losers. So why-oh-why do managers do such things? Do the managers who came up with these ideas (and others like them) ever put themselves in the place of the person they were rewarding, and asked themselves how they would feel if someone treated them that way? I suspect not. But then, why wouldn’t they do so?" - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

Ouch. - LB: #TeamMonique

"We need to reassess what it means to work at 100%. Working at 100% capacity is depleting and short-sighted, but working with 100% focus is incredibly effective, optimal, and the key to finishing your creative work. Rather than thinking about working at 100%, try to work at 85% capacity with 100% focus. It may seem that this is giving less than everything you’ve got – because it is – but by keeping a little capacity in the tank every day, you can stop the sprint/crash cycle that seems to be a natural part of the creative life. Save a little every day so you can do more over the course of a week." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"The key to getting more done is to focus on completing fewer things." - imabonehead

"Are you working longer hours, attending more meetings, taking shorter vacations, answering more emails and eating lunch at your desk, if you eat lunch at all? Does demand in your life just keep getting higher, so you're struggling more and more just to keep up? Are you utterly sick of hearing the phrase "do more with less?" Does the word "unsustainable" sound about right?" - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"Jason Fried has a radical theory of working: that the office isn't a good place to do it. At TEDxMidwest, he lays out the main problems (call them the M&Ms) and offers three suggestions to make work work." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"Setting myself a concrete task, and measuring each day whether I’m complying with it, makes me far more likely to stick to my resolution." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"Pros * Customize, research and record exercises by muscle type * More than 300 exercises with animations (with optional separate app install) * Get recommended workouts * Chart results and sync online * Create your own exercises and workout routines" - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

...is that The Thing from Fantastic Four?—.LOLz! - .LAG liked that

This is what I use. Haven't found anything better. - Rahsheen?

"Notepad++ is the most popular text editor for Windows, and we love its speed and power, but it's even better once you dig a little deeper. Here's a look at the many ways you can use Notepad++ more effectively." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"If you never venture outside the box, you will probably not be creative. But if you never get inside the box, you will certainly be stupid." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"Whether it’s an investment, a career choice, or another big life decision, here are some rules I’ve developed to help me figure out what to do when I have absolutely no idea what to do:" - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"let's look at how changing what you eat can help fend off mid-day energy slumps and blah feelings from your work day." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"A difference of $3,000 might not sound like a lot, but consider that the salary increase not only continues year after year, but all future salary increases are based on that initial number. Say I average a five percent salary increase each year. Then that $4,000 quickly turns into $21,000 after six years. After 30 years, it becomes over $200,000! The difference becomes magnified further if you negotiate a higher salary each time you change jobs." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"focus on small blocks of time with a focus on realistic output. In addition to limiting the total amount of time you spend working (and recognizing the limitations of how much work you can do in the process), focus on limiting the size of your individual blocks of work. If you sit down in front of a task with an open-ended schedule like "I need to finish this entire project by the end of the day", you're setting yourself up for a bout of procrastination. In the mind of a procrastinator, the end of the business day is practically in the next century. Instead say "I have 30 minutes to work before I must take a small break to relax. What can I realistically accomplish in 30 minutes?" - LANjackal from Bookmarklet