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{ Category Archives } Advice

The bones beneath the skin

A few months ago, I was struck by this tweet from HiroBoga. For whatever reason, a circuit snapped in my head and I Got It.
All my little productivity obsessions and systems were all about creating my own infrastructure: my calendar, my to-do list, my inbox, my habits, all of it. If I were to look [...]

Lavers on The Simple Life

My previous post Fred Stutzman and Facebook reminded me of an essay from the May/August 2000 issue of North American Review.
The essay I tore out and kept in my “Essays” folder lo these many years was by the writer Norman Lavers, now retired from teaching English and enthusiastically maintaining a site on The Robber [...]

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Is grad school a good idea?

Penelope Trunk trots out one of her regularly visited themes: why grad school is a bad idea. It rankled me a bit but I do have to remember that she’s talking to twenty-somethings and I’m a forty-odder.
Her advice would be right-on to my 23-year-old self: I had very little direction, a graduate degree would have [...]

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Links Harvest

Economic downturn hitting public libraries. Also, library fines.
Another popularly focused article on the digital dark age; it proposes using open-source rather than proprietary file formats.
The best suit for your body type.
Proto-scholar learns the hard way to ask the right people for process advice. No one would blame her for feeling angry and bitter about this [...]

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No Heroic Efforts

I meant to add this time management rule to my previous Fall Review post. I  can’t remember whether it originated with Mark Forster or David Allen, but it goes something like this: At all costs, avoid heroic efforts to get things done.
Examples of an heroic effort would be pulling an all-nighter or shoving all other [...]

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