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What Andy's Doing
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Recently Written
- Passionate People: Get What You Deserve, Become a Career Renegade!
- Featured Blog: Patrick Rhone and His Journal
- Ask The Readers: Can You Disconnect And Still Be Productive?
- Why Working Long, Hard Hours Gets You Behind (?)
- How to Help Great Productivity Blogs Get Discovered
- My Scandelous Confession and A Royal Rant About GTD
- On New Beginnings (And More About Your Host)
- Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow
- How to Use Basecamp and Backback In Perfect Harmony
- How to Chill Out
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How to Chill Out
With all of this talk of accomplishing tasks, people like you and me can easily lose sight of one of the great pleasures of life. Freaking relaxing.I can tell you that I am usually finding myself consulting lists and checking inboxes when I should be enjoying the movie I’m watching or the book I’m reading. I get so caught up in the little mini-rush of being organized and productive that I don’t stop to smell the roses nearly as often as I ought to.
One way to curb this nasty habit is to pull the braindead move of putting your lists away. Whatever your data vault of choice happens to be, put it somewhere where it won’t be calling your name.
Switchtasking
This post was written by business coach Dave Crenshaw, author of the great new book The Myth of Multitasking
I’d like to share a valuable principle with you. It’s something I’ve taught to many business owners and executives I’ve worked with. This principle may go against the grain of some of your beliefs about time and the best way to get things done. Because of that, I ask you to keep an open mind.
Multitasking is a myth. It just plain doesn’t exist.
Thing to Remember When Your Kids Are Driving You Frickin’ Insane
Watching a small child slowly grow into an actual, real-live person is an interesting thing. They watch you so intently when you speak, drinking it all in. This gives way to imitation as they take on your specific habits and behaviors (which they’ll then mold to fit their own personalities and such). There are times when I’m blown away by how much my son acts like me, enunciates words as I do, even the slightest mannerisms look like mirror images of myself. It’s one of the first times as a parent that you truly realize how heavily you influence your kids, down to their very essence as people.
Now, all that touchy-feely crap aside, there are times when the whole “learning everything” bit can get a little exhausting. The most common example is the “Why?” phase that hits right around 3 years old (I’m hip-deep in it as I write this). Just for those of you who either don’t have kids or have forgotten how this tends to go, I’ll give you a short example of the kind of thing I mean:
Web Warrior Tools - Get Your Smart On
My very good buddies Glen (of LifeDev) and Leo (of Zen Habits) launched their brand new ebook store today, called Web Warrior Tools. Much like their awesome blogs, the main idea behind the books they sell is improving your life. And don’t let the name fool you - these precious volumes are good for anybody, not just us chumps that spend all day tapping on the keyboard.
They’ve already got some killer titles fresh off of the presses, including:
- The Beginner’s Guide to Podcasting
- Email Zen
- The Get Rich Slowly Guide to Roth IRAs
- Secrets to a Healthy Life
The best part their offerings (and ebooks in general, really) is that you can have them now! Click to buy, and you’re ready to go a few seconds later. Gotta love the freakin’ Internet.
All books offer a free preview of a chapter or two, so you can peruse a good chunk of the book before paying a nickel. Run - don’t walk - over to Web Warrior Tools and get yourself some of the finest ebooks from the finest bloggers on the web!
Brand New Site by Cranking Widgets
There are times in life when you decide “enough is enough“. This past week was one of those times.
I get a fair amount of email. Not as much as some, but it’s a pretty steady stream. Sometimes, those messages are from well-wishing friends who thought I might enjoy an inspirational message from an unknown source. Messages like these are almost always sent to a whole pantload of people. And all of our email addresses are nicely collected in the ‘To’ field, where every recipient now has access to my email address.
This is, frankly, infuriating. So much so that I decided to take some (arguably passive) action. I created a website where I can send people who do this.
Humbly, I give you bccplease.com. The idea is pretty self-explanatory, when you send an email to a million people, put their email addresses in the ‘BCC’ field instead of the ‘To’ field.
I hope you can all find some use for it, feel free to direct any email abusers you encounter on over for some tough love.
Enjoy!
8 Ninja Uses for Binder Clips
I would be willing to wager that most people, during their first office supply shopping trip after having read Getting Things Done, pick up some binder clips. This is probably because they happened across the Hipster PDA at some point during their GTD travels and thought, “man, that looks like something I could really get into - and for like $5, tops…”. Hell, you could build Hipster PDAs for a small village for like $20, who wouldn’t be tempted by such a small admission price? I know I wasn’t - I’ve got a whole tub of probably 30-40 binder clips of varying sizes that has been very busy gathering dust for many months now.
If you find yourself in this boat, have no fear, for I have compiled some seriously hacky uses for all those binder clips. They may not all have mass appeal, but they are examples of how to take your productivity gear to places it was never intended 
Reasons to Get a Tattoo (and Reasons Not To)
I have lots of tattoos. Something like 30 at last count, if memory serves. As tattoos have grown in popularity and social acceptance, it’s very likely that your average 20-something has one or more tattoos. And while I’m certainly not an expert on the art of tattooing, I’ve got a good deal of experience with tattoos (mostly because I get lots of people who want to show theirs to me) and can enumerate fairly confidently what are good reasons for getting a tattoo. I can also tell you what are not good reasons
People’s tastes in tattoo design has always fascinated me. Everything from beautifully ornate recreations of their mother’s High School yearbook photo to a cup of coffee and a donut (seriously, I’ve seen it). Far be it from me to tell somebody I think their tattoo is dumb (to their face, at least), but I think there are some pretty hard-and-fast rules about choosing a design for your next tattoo.
11 Tips for Better Tech Support
We’ve all been there. Something’s dreadfully wrong with your trusty computer - you can’t print, you can’t get on the web, you can’t play Bejeweled. For whatever reason, the problem is major enough to warrant one of the most desperate acts you can imagine - a phone call to tech support.
Now, before we dig in, let me tell you that I’ve done my time answering the tech support phone calls. I spent a good 3 years at it, so I have a pretty good idea what I’m talking about. And while I didn’t enjoy it for the most part, it was an enlightening experience. The support calls that were the most pleasant (or least unbearable, it could also be said) were with people who took the time to perform one or more of the steps I’m going to outline here. Trust me folks, this is the real freaking McCoy.
The key to making things work with your tech support representative is to make things easy for them. I know that there are a great many jackasses out there who feel some sense of entitlement and indignation when speaking to people in service roles, but believe me - you want them to be happy.
Keep Your Notes in Order with the Daily Scratchpad
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.
The Single Most Useful Contact on Your iPhone
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 them with a raw purple passion, but - if you have a phone - they’re almost as certain as death and taxes. It sucks, but that’s the freakin’ reality of the situation.
This little gem occurred to me just a few days ago. This past weekend, I’d taken our car into the local Toyota dealership for it’s oil change/tire rotation/etc. maintenance visit. It went very well, no hiccups or accidental scratches, none of that. Then, the following Monday morning, I got an email from them asking to take a short survey about my service experience. Took less than 2 minutes and I was happy to do it.
