Jim Eagar Reading Time: 4 minutesThe Limits of “Time Management” Thinking For years, productivity has been obsessed with time management. In one sense, we must manage our time to ensure that we do the things that are most important to us. Doing anything worthwhile takes time, so some management is necessary. However, this mentality has often led us to see …
Reading Time: 3 minutesMy Retirement Didn’t Go as Expected When I retired over 10 years ago, I had no idea what retirement involved. I didn’t know it was a major life transition or what to expect. After the first-year “honeymoon phase,” I was surprised by the emotional shift that followed with the “loss and lost” phase—loss of identity, purpose, status, …
Reading Time: 3 minutesA Summer That Doesn’t Need to Sparkle Recently, I read an article on Sarah Winters’ blog titled, Maybe This Summer Isn’t Meant to be Magical. Winters discusses the cultural pressure she feels every year to have a “magical, extraordinary summer.” As an illustration of cultural pressure, she describes how many magazines feature articles such as …
Reading Time: 3 minutesA Different Kind of Productivity Book What if your weekly review could be faster, more visual, and more motivating? A simple table I discovered in Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s new book, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World, changed the way I reflect each week—and I think it might help you too. Although …
Reading Time: 3 minutesYou’ll Never Finish It All—and That’s Okay Our culture prioritizes productivity and life hacks, allowing us to make every possible minute productive. We work to squeeze results out of every minute. However, as Oliver Burkeman points out in his book, 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, we are, in fact, finite human beings. No matter …
Reading Time: 5 minutesA Role I Valued, but at Too High a Cost Last Spring and Summer, I was a volunteer ranger at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site near Badlands National Park in South Dakota. In the Fall, I volunteered to work part-time as an NPS ranger. We were short-staffed, and I wanted to experience life as …
Reading Time: < 1 minuteI don’t do social media except to post links to my blog posts. As a way of filling people in on what I’ve been up to lately, I periodically update my “Updates” page with my current projects, work, and life. Today I updated my Updates Page. Check it out if you want to know what’s …
Reading Time: 4 minutesWhat Are You Feeding Your Mind? In a recent Farnham Street Newsletter, Shane Parrish wrote, “Your body reflects what you eat. Your mind reflects what you consume.” October 20, 2024, No. 598. Mental junk food is low-value, highly addictive information or digital content that stimulates but doesn’t nourish the mind, similar to how processed snack …
Reading Time: 5 minutesWhat Is Incubation—and Why It Matters Incubating ideas is often a crucial stage in the creative process. It enables you to do your best work. Allowing for incubation means giving ideas time to “churn” below the threshold of consciousness, working in the background of your mind while you aren’t focused directly on the problem. First, …