Reading Time: 6 minutesThe Case Against My Own Advice Two years ago, I wrote a blog post arguing for planning your day in the morning rather than in the evening before. I said that I did my best daily planning in the morning, and that the last thing I wanted to do in the late afternoon was to …
Reading Time: 6 minutesI regularly use my Claude Cowork robot assistant to interview me on various topics across different settings. Being interviewed by the AI doesn’t change what I think. It helps me say it more clearly in my own conversational voice and surfaces aspects of a topic I hadn’t consciously addressed. The thinking stays mine. The AI’s …
Reading Time: 5 minutesPosition Yourself, Don’t Fix Yourself So many times I’ve walked away from a conversation thinking, “This is what I should have said.” I’ve always sucked at thinking on my feet. It’s when I have time that my best thinking happens. Actively position yourself in circumstances where you can excel in your strengths, rather than staying …
Reading Time: 5 minutesI’ve been doing quarterly reviews as a part of David Sparks’ Productivity Field Guide role-based system since January 2021, but I’ve never had a review as thorough and enjoyable as the one I did with Claude Cowork last month. Cowork strips the drudgery out of the quarterly review: it handles the calendar scanning, reading three …
Reading Time: 4 minutesWhen Saying Yes Means Saying No A little over a year ago, I had to say no to something I really wanted to do because I’d already said yes to other things. A creator friend offered me the opportunity to work with him by helping with backstage administrative support. I had to say no because …
Reading Time: 4 minutesYour Brain Is Set to Wander — and That’s Not a Problem A landmark Harvard study found that people’s minds wander 46.9% of the time — nearly half — regardless of what they are doing. Most people secretly think something is wrong with them when their mind wanders. You’re not broken, you’re human. As Steve …
Reading Time: 5 minutesWhen we think of values, we typically think of them as nouns. For example, we talk about integrity, honesty, or family as values. But values as nouns often don’t lead to actions or tell you what you need to do. For that to happen, we need to turn values into verbs. I recently read a …
Reading Time: 3 minutesMost of us go through the day forming intentions and making choices by default rather than through deliberate decision-making. Instead, our choices are made through habits, social contagion, and unexamined assumptions. In his recent book, Intentional, productivity expert Chris Bailey reveals that researchers have found that most of our actions run on neural autopilot. This …
Reading Time: 4 minutesThe Question That Changes Everything About Productivity Productivity advice is everywhere. Tips, tricks, hacks, systems. The goal is always the same: get more done, faster. But here’s the question almost nobody stops to ask: Why? Why be productive in the first place? Science Has Already Figured Out What Drives You In his recent book, Intentional: …
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe Story We Tell Ourselves When I know I have a project coming up (like writing a blog post), I typically start preparing early. At a minimum, I’ll jot down some thoughts about the topic and start a mind map. I’ll do some research and plug that into my mind map. Then I back off …