Image courtesy of
London Permaculture

The following is a guest post by Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project

We’re all looking for ways to work both faster and calmer, and I recently hit on a trick that keeps my desk tidier and my thoughts clearer.

One of my most annoying habits is my tendency to scribble down important phone numbers, “Don’t forget!!!” notes, and helpful URLs on any piece of paper that happens to be cluttering up my desk.

An hour later, I throw away what appears to be trash, or I flip over a piece of paper —and the key info vanishes. Or even if the information was still there, I have no idea what it means. Sure, that phone number has a star by it, so it must be important—but I can’t remember whose number it is.

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Like most adults living in America today, I get many phone calls. Some from my wife, my mom, my brother, my friends. But sometimes, I get phone calls from the local health club, the local car dealership or somebody trying to get me to buy 5 pounds of veal. Unsolicited phone calls. We all hate [...]

I’m a big fan of Twitter (even though we’ve had our differences in the past – mostly due to my not “getting it”). While my updates may not be as fast, furious or incessant as some of the people whom I follow, I do try to pop on there as often as is feasible without [...]

Photo Courtesy of uafcde It’s one of the best feelings in the world, heading in for your first day at a new job. Everything feels fresh and new, you feel like you’re starting with a clean slate and that you’re really going to ace this one. You’re just so positive about everything, especially if it’s [...]

As I mentioned previously, i received an iPhone for this past Christmas. While I really love it, having to go from a 60gb iPod which held all of my music to having only 8gb of space took some getting used to. I started out by hand-picking various albums and tracks and changing the contents each [...]

Within this little GTD cult of ours, there are an alarming number of battles fought over the best tool, notebook, web application, etc. In my mind, it’s a little silly – just use what works, right? Well, sometimes there will be two “competing” services/devices/things that both offer a compelling solution to a common problem. Today, [...]

Your laptop computer. This is a picture of my Macbook after my 2.5 year old son got his hands on it:

Photo by Vit6 Ah, the Internet. It’s one of those things that regularly inspires awe in me, even though I spend several hours a day interacting with it (both professionally and recreationally). But with such an immense amount of information, it’s difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. While there are [...]

I have to be honest – this past Christmas, the item at the top of my wish list was the completely drool-worthy Amazon Kindle. I had watched the video intro a dozen times and was completely smitten. And while I had been secretly longing for an iPhone since they were released, I simpley never thought [...]

I thought this might be a cool thing to mention, especially since I haven’t ever been interviewed for this productivity stuff. This weekend, my new buddy Mike from Effing the Dog and I will be having a friendly conversation that will go out on his podcast at some point in the near future. Should be [...]