I Done This Support Teresa Norton writes at HBR about how a simple exercise called the story spine can help you get unstuck and make change while “living truthfully” at work. The story spine is a narrative tool created by playwright, improviser, and theater educator Kenn Adams used to craft well-structured stories. As Norton’s post shows, the story spine can be … Read more
[T]he really important thing about being alive is how you relate to other people and the world around you, rather than how many tasks you complete or how quickly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MckHLBWuz7E
harvest:
Jack White, on inspiration, creativity, and work ethic:
Inspiration and work ethic — they ride right next to each other…. Not every day you’re gonna wake up and the clouds are gonna part and rays from heaven are gonna come down and you’re gonna write a song from it. Sometimes, you just get in there and just force yourself to work, and maybe something good will come out.
Ten life lessons — for everyone!
dad’s wise words. applicable to any pursuit, i believe.
— Mark Hoffmann comments on this NYT Well blog post, suggesting that willpower improves when you define your tasks better.
It’s hard to build great technology products without a muser. The muser not only adds emotional motivation to the developer’s work ethic; she serves a cognitive function of focusing his mind on the one thing that truly matters: what using the thing is like. Without her, projects disintegrate into scattered bundles of individual features, appealing to the intellect but not the heart.
– Jakob Lodwick, Elepath.
Hands down the most inspired we’ve felt as a company has been our excursions to visit our musers, see first-hand how they get down with iDoneThis, and chat about the vision and direction of the company.
It started serendipitously. In February, we’d started corresponding with a guy named Tobi at Shopify about a support matter who turned out to be the CEO. The more we talked to Tobi and read about Shopify, the more enamored we grew with them — they do things their own way and on their own terms, and they’ve been wildly successful.
“I feel I was simply stubborn enough to want to do my thing… . If there’s something that you want to do, you should just do it. And maybe the world will reward you and maybe it won’t, but it doesn’t matter as long as you’re happy.”
The Big Think asked Malcolm Gladwell what the secret was behind his success. We learn from his answers not to worry about it, that expertise doesn’t necessarily translate into success, and that if you do what you want to do, that’s success enough.
More naps = boosts in productivity, cognitive function, memory, and creativity!!
Sleeping and Science, FTW!
We are constantly trading off what we are doing now against what we might do in the future. As long as we are doing that in a reasonable way, it doesn’t matter that we are putting some things off.
Frank Partnoy reports on how experts in different fields view procrastination in Procrastination Rules. He describes how a journalist manages time by managing delay:
For projects that require different amounts of time, Guerrera makes separate lists. He describes a technique he and many other journalists use: “We have two sets of notebooks, a small one and a big one. The small one is for immediate day-to-day stories, the work we have to do right away. The big one is for big thoughts, features and stories that have some time. There’s an actual physical distinction between our immediate stories and the ones we can wait on. The physical form of two notebooks is our way of saying it’s too overwhelming to do both at the same time.”
Managing delay or, yes, procrastination, can be positive, reasonable behavior depending on what you’re actually trading off.
A 2005 study by the International Labour Organization found that nutrition habits do indeed directly influence work productivity. Mindflash’s infographic offers some great brain food suggestions. We’re always up for eating more dark chocolate, avocados, and blueberries – yum! Click here for a proper viewing size.