March 2008

Fake Plastic Trees

I’ll give you fair warning on this post: if you don’t like “the making of” pieces or introspection, you likely won’t get much out of this post. I’m not sure how it’s all going to fit together or whether I’m going to be providing anything useful. I’ll also admit that part of this post is [...]

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15 Ways to Practice Friendliness

credit: )3runo This post is a continuation of the Practicing the Virtues Series. This week, we’ll talk about practicing friendliness. I’ll give a brief recap of where we’re at. We become more virtuous through practice. For more information, see this post. The virtues are interconnected in a very important way. Improving one virtue tends to [...]

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The Daily Productivity Planner: Plan Your Day By Your Productive Capacity

Update: The most current version of this aid is available on the Free Planner page. This post references an older version. Hot off the press!: the . This aid is a companion to the Productivity Heatmap and allows you to plan in detail how you’re going to execute the tasks for the day. I’m taking [...]

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Making a Habit of Changing Habits

The Global Elders, from left: Peter Gabriel, Muhammad Yunus, Mary Robinson, Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Sir Richard Branson. Taken from the Global Elders website. Some people seem to be able to script themselves to change habits almost at whim. Where most of us falter and fight, these people make [...]

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What Preschool Taught Us About Time Management

I mentioned in How Heatmapping Your Productivity Can Make You More Productive that I thought most personal planners got time wrong and presented all blocks of times as being equal. Later that day, I was thinking about how to capture the rather inchoate ideas in A Special Theory of Relativity (it really is coming, but [...]

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Whose Blogspace Is This, Anyways?

I’m trying to save all of my metablogging posts ’til Friday, since if I wrote about all the stuff related to blogging that I’m thinking about, I’d probably write as much about blogging as I do anything else. That said, we’re off! Michelle at Bloggrrl wrote today about something that has been on my mind [...]

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How Heatmapping Your Productivity Can Make You More Productive

Update: I decided to place the form at the top of the post to make it easier to download. Grab it here: I’ve been a bit bottlenecked recently with some of my posts. I’ve been stewing over A Special Theory of Productivity and trying to figure out the best way to present it. Meanwhile, another [...]

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12 Ways to Practice Courage

In my overview of Aristotelian ethics, I noted that we become more virtuous through practice. This post gives activities and suggestions that help you practice courage. The virtues are interconnected in a very important way. It turns out that working on one virtue has reciprocal effects on other virtues. You’ll see the reciprocal virtues listed [...]

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A General Theory of Productivity

The question “Why Am I Productive?” very rarely comes up when we’re productive. Usually, it’s when we’re not productive that we ask why we’re not being productive. Asking the question in the negative like that often gets us to quick fixes, but very often does not answer it in a way that’s helpful. Here recently [...]

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