a unique productivity philosophy called deep work. He carefully blocked out his day, and created space for long, uninterrupted hours to write ... tactics like travelling on foot to give himself more time in isolation and actively sought out isolated spaces to work... his latest book, Digital Minimalism... there's an implicit reward for the sha…

I have basically figured out for myself how to use Facebook as a workplace.

Newport defines Deep Work as “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”... in an average office setting such a state of prolonged “distraction-free concentration” is all but impo…

One of the most important things when working together is to be clear on who is helping who with what and why... I’m trying to make working together effortless by showing how easy it is to map what’s actually going on when people collaborate. You can normally draw it out on a page. It normally doesn’t take longer than an hour or two.... I call the…

Jane.ai, an artificially intelligent platform that indexes data from cloud storage providers, teams, and more... allows employees to search through its corpus using conversational language...an intuitive, intelligent AI-powered Teammate who gives employees instant access to the information they need to do their jobs well.

To #DeleteFacebook is to throw the baby out with the bathwater without solving the underlying problem.This is not another post on the benefits or evils of Facebook — you can figure that out for yourself…- my latest post accepted into The Mission

it is not just Zuckerberg. None of the company’s key executives has a “normal” Facebook presence. You can’t add them as friends, they rarely post publicly and they keep private some information that the platform suggests be made public by default... Over at Twitter, the story is the same.... what do they know that we don’t?... former vice-preside…

the NoPhone, a plastic rectangle resembling a smartphone, now exist... raised $18,000 on Kickstarter... people who report using seven to 11 social media platforms had more than three times the risk of depression and anxiety than their peers who use zero to two ... Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter ... delivering ... “variable rewards.” Messages,…

Read it when you need it... ... you can make up a reason to need it... As long as it leads you to directly apply what you learn and turn it from nothing into something... Only then will learning be meaningful.... from reading to retention, I see five phases. Let’s walk through them... waiting for a few days until you extract a book’s lifeblood...…

Decades of studies have demonstrated a positive correlation between writing (particularly journaling) and health.... lower blood pressure, improved immune function, and fewer visits to the doctor... better relationships, improved memory, and more success at work... therapists often use journaling to get their patients to better understand how part…

people performed worst when their phones were nearby, and best when they were away in a separate room ... merely having their smartphones out on the desk led ... impairment of individuals’ cognitive capacity — on par with effects of lacking sleep... our smartphones can adversely affect our ability to think and problem-solve ... even when they are …

The “forgetting curve,” ... is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something... unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain ... leaving you with a fraction of what you took in... those who binge-watched TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than people who watched one episode a week... most common…

“death by PowerPoint,”... sucks the life and energy out of ... meetings... spreadsheets rife with errors and macro miscalculations. Email and chat facilitate ... inbox overload ... So what makes artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) champions confident that their technologies will be immune to comparably counterproductive outcomes? ... …

“If your job consists of Tweeting for someone else, you owe it to yourself to think of something else in 2018. Particularly if you’re under 35."It’s early January, and so time to add to the slew of “What you should do in 2018” posts sloshing around the Net.

non-stop activity isn’t the apotheosis of productivity. It is its adversary.... the work we produce at the end of a 14-hour day is of worse quality than when we’re fresh... undermines our creativity and our cognition... make us feel physically sick... For people over 40, research found that a 25-hour work week may be optimal for cognition... elite…

This is a heavily updated repost of my latest Top3ics newsletter. It’s not a copy/paste repost, because Before you Repost it, ReThink It.

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

The open-plan office continues to doggedly spread, despite study after study suggesting it makes employees more miserable, more ill, less friendly and less productive... if a company is determined to inflict this woe on its workers, it should observe some basic rules...:

Whether you read, curate or create, you need to manage the content that matters to you if you want to extract maximum benefit from it.

waking up early has nothing to do with the alarm clock, but it has everything to do with these elements... Let’s go through one thing at the time.

four “stages of control”: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification... The unconscious mind “Incubates” the information collected, and finds connections that lead to “Illumination”... If you arrange your creative work according to these seven categories, you can ease creative insights through the four stages of control.

Scientists have conducted a fair bit of research on the factors that can make people more (or less) focused, productive, and creative.

asking the following question of a given activity: will this add significant value to something I find to be significantly important to my life?... is this activity “the best” way to add value to this area of my life? ... focus on finding the small number of activities that offer the most such value... Many of the best uses of the online world s…

Many famous scientists have something in common—they didn’t work long hours... lives were full and memorable, their work was prodigious, and yet their days are also filled with downtime... great students didn’t just practice more than the average, they practiced more deliberately... engaging with full concentration in a special activity to improv…

In today’s work environment, with multiple responsibilities and an abundance of sources of distractions, it is difficult to stay focussed. Here are some of the strategies that I’ve used successfully in my own work and in helping my clients be more productive.

Bill Gates. At the end of each day, he would look at what he had worked on, and asked himself “what is on this list that somebody else could have done?”... we should be asking the following questions each day: What’s really important here? How am I using my gifts? What is my genius and how I can I bring it forth to impact my family, culture, a…

Journaling daily is the most potent and powerful keystone habit you can acquire. If done correctly, you will show up better in every area of your life ... We’ve become addicted to input... to reactively being guided by other people’s agendas... wakes up and immediately ... journal for 30 minutes... sleeping, his subconscious mind has been brewing…

employees have little faith in their leadership:22% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization has a clear direction for the organization.15% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization makes them enthusiastic about the future.13% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization communicat…

Yet another variation on the Top3ics format: exploring three facets of one topic, highlighting one outstanding resource (plus a few extra links) for each.  Today’s theme... psychology