Focus

Use The Two-Tab Rule To Stay Focused

How many tabbed windows do you have open right now? Can you remember what all those tabbed windows are about? In the early days of browsers, a perennial and annoying problem was only being able to have one window open at a time. Now, all major browsers give you the capability of opening windows in [...]

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How To Lose An Hour’s Creative Mojo In Two Minutes

Have you ever started an action that you thought would be quick and looked up an hour later and you’re either still working on that one thing or have switched to doing something similar to that action without thinking about it? I’m sure you have. Sometimes it’s okay that this happens, but it’s incredibly frustrating [...]

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Ask Charlie: How Do You Mindmap and Purge?

Note: “Ask Charlie” is a new category of posts where I answer the questions people send me via email, Twitter, or wherever else we interact. After trying to figure out the best way to get these going and what to name them, I decided to just roll with it the easy way and revise as [...]

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The Key To Consistent Creativity and Productivity

How long can you concentrate and focus on one thing before your energy and attention begins to falter? How long does it take you to engage in a particular thing to make the effort of engagement worth it? The answers to those two questions make up (what I’m calling) your engagement threshold, and figuring out [...]

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How Parkinson’s Law Blocks Your Happiness And Creativity

Are you using Parkinson’s Law as the foundation for spending less time on tasks? Maybe it’s time to reconsider whether this is sustainable and effective…

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When It’s Not Worth Planning to Do Something Worth Doing

I used to think, “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth planning to do.” Though the phrase is sticky, it’s not quite right. I was thinking about this in reference to Julie’s Mindmapping Different Kinds of Time, wherein she wrote about her experience of combining mindmaps with ideas similar to the ones presented in Create, Connect, [...]

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How Vegas is Like The Holidays

After spending time there for Blogworld, I came to a realization: Vegas is one of those places that it takes a while to recover from even if you don’t do anything that should require recovery. What does Vegas have to with making room for your business during the holidays? Easy – the holidays can overwhelm [...]

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Don’t Leave Your Trash On the Stairs!

Some of you are aware that Jen Hofmann and I have been planning our recently launched Work Party for a few weeks now. One of the things Jen was really excited about covering is “Dead Stuff,” by which she means stuff that you haven’t physically touched in over a year. She’s found that many people [...]

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Stop Checking Email!

Odds are, if you’re reading this, you’ve probably checked your email a few times today. And I have a couple of questions for you: Why are you checking your email? What’s in there that will really make a difference to what you’re doing for the day? Take a second to think about your answers. If [...]

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