I haven’t used this service, but I sure appreciate the thinking behind it. The team at Doist (the creators of Todoist) noticed how Slack was changing how they worked: > When our remote team started using Slack three years ago, we experienced the subtle but real impact that design has on behavior. From its free-flowing chat channels to its one-line-at-a-time message composers, everything about Slack was designed to keep you communicating with your team in real-time, all the time. (It’s not surpr…
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For any of us with children, this is the question that will quite possibly define our generation as parents.
This article paints a scary picture. As a father of 4 young ones for whom “screen time” is a highlight of each day, I have a lot of trepidation on the entire topic. It’s a longer read, but the essence of it is that despite being safer during the teen years than most generations before them, teens today have a higher rate of mental illness. I found the article well written, with the author eschewing the need to wax nostalgic: > To those of us who fondly recall a more analog adolescence, this ma…
On the topic of habits, Jocelyn K. Glei makes the case for ensuring your have whitespace in your day (aka margin). She’s drawing from the design principle and applying it to every day life. > We need white space in our daily lives just as much as we need it in our designs because the concept carries over: If our lives are over-cluttered and over-booked, we can’t focus properly on anything. What’s more, this way of working actually shrinks our ability to think creatively. The older I get, the mo…
Here’s another enjoyable essay from Craig Mod. He’s one of my very favourite writers and this article was no different. However, although I usually read Craig’s writing and feel like he’s ahead of the rest of us, that was not the case for this article. His experience reminds me of many others in the past year or two (example [http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/09/andrew-sullivan-technology-almost-killed-me.html] ). By the time I finished the post, I thought back to how Cal Newport opines that Inte…
Happy Monday, everyone! I wanted to remind you that The Focus Course is open for registration as of today. Shawn and his team have refreshed the course and added new content (including the recent Focus Summit videos). For all those who sign up early on, there is also the chance to win some cool prizes. Register here [https://thefocuscourse.com/?ref=10] Full disclosure: as a guest of the Focus Summit, I benefit from referring people to sign up for The Focus Course. I hope that you’ve been read…
Chris Savage, co-founder of Wistia [https://wistia.com/welcome], shares a little about how he had to change how he approached his own work. As their business grew, his time became more scarce as more and more things filled it up. And that was a problem: > There comes a point when your effectiveness falters, though, when you’re no longer focusing on the right things or doing your best work. In fact, you may have already passed that point, but you didn’t realize because your busy schedule made yo…
Austin Kleon shares how he and wife try to cultivate a space and a time where one can get away from the world. > Kids, jobs, sleep, and a thousand other things will get in the way, but we have to find our own sacred space, our own sacred time. I give this a hearty, “Amen!” As one who values some daily time away from all the activity and people of my life, I appreciate the idea. And I can understand the need for both a space and time. Oddly enough, I appreciate both. During the workday, I appre…