The Cranking Widgets Blog

How Holidays and Vacations Make you Sick and What to do About it.

I woke up this morning with a tickle in my throat that has developed into a painful sore throat. This is a familiar beginning of a cold or flu will likely hit me full force tomorrow… Today is the Sunday of my Thanksgiving break and impending sickness must be my punishment for enjoying four peaceful [...]

Theme Change #2: Productivity for Entrepreneurs

Written by Andy Parkinson

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The focus of The Cranking Widgets Blog will have much more of an entrepreneurial bent going forward.
I collect companies and business ideas like many productivity lovers collect pens and notebooks. Entrepreneurship is in every fiber of my being. My record is far from spotless, but if I judge my performance against the statistics I’ve beat [...]

How to Launch a Project in 3 Hours

Written by Andy Parkinson

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I’m a huge fan of Ruby on Rails because of how fast it enables techies to get a new project out the door and into the hands of users. For non-programmers Ruby on Rails is a development framework brought to you by 37Signals that powers some of your favorite sites, like Basecamp, Twitter, LinkedIn and [...]

Passionate People: Get What You Deserve, Become a Career Renegade!

Written by Andy Parkinson

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We had just finished putting on our full-body suits, our BCDs, weight belts and air tanks. The waves were about 4 feet tall as we waddled out with what felt like a ton of gear on our backs. Given our experience, 4 feet is high but we noticed the waves are coming in groups of 5, [...]

Featured Blog: Patrick Rhone and His Journal

Written by Andy Parkinson

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This is the first post of many over the coming months as part of an ongoing attempt to help shed more light on bloggers who aim to help you get more done and reach your goals. If you’d like to suggest a blog, check out my original post “How to Help Great Productivity Blogs Get Discovered” and leave a [...]

Ask The Readers: Can You Disconnect And Still Be Productive?

Written by Andy Parkinson

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I hope everyone out there in the US enjoyed their Thanksgiving holiday! Many of us enjoyed a 4 day weekend away from work or our normal responsibilities. As for me, I spent all but about an hour completely disconnected from the Internet world. The greatest part was that there weren’t any of those nervous ticks that I might have expected. [...]

Why Working Long, Hard Hours Gets You Behind (?)

Written by Andy Parkinson

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I was at a dinner party the other day and observed the following fascinating exchange (names have been changed to protect the innocent ):
Cheryl is enjoying her wine and poking away at her Blackberry when she notices her acquantance Jude had just arrived. Cheryl gets up and walks over to Jude. They greet eachother with a hug’s and hello’s. Jude asks, “Hey! [...]

How to Help Great Productivity Blogs Get Discovered

Written by Andy Parkinson

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It is my observation that writers of niche blogs have a fairly predictable shelf life. Most non-news-telling bloggers that see some early successes last a good 2-3 years before they stop posting. Most of the time the value posts are made within the first 12 months and it goes downhill from there. (Side tip: whenever you discover a new blog [...]

My Scandelous Confession and A Royal Rant About GTD

Written by Andy Parkinson

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I have a confession to make. Actually, I’m pretty sure most lovers of GTD have a similar confession, but first I need to start by expressing some assumptions about most of us who are reading this right now (and feel free to challenge any of these via comments).
Most of Us…
Most of us have read Getting [...]

Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

Written by Brett Kelly

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About two years ago, I first laid my hands on a copy of Getting Things Done by David Allen. I tore through it and feebly decided that I wanted to share my discoveries and ideas with the world, so this blog was born.
There have definitely been ups and downs. I went from posting like a [...]