Here’s a fantastic post from Douglas Johnston @ a million monkeys typing on how to get out of the trap of trying to use too much technology and overcomplicating the process of time managment:
Productivity and “The Beginner’s Mind”
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Category Archives: Productivity
How to overcome “GeekBlock”
From SecretGeek
Just as writers are prone to writer’s block, programmers are prone to GeekBlock.
Maybe we can’t find the cause of a particular bug,or maybe we just can’t stop surfing the web when we know there’s things we should be doing.
Having found myself in the clutches of GeekBlock more than once, I’ve put together some notes from the inside.
Non-obvious SlickRun feature
SlickRun is a Windows productivity app that has changed my life. I’ve been using it happily for months to quickly launch programs and fire off emails with a few keystrokes, but today I stumbled upon a nifty little feature that I didn’t know about.
Type =32*32 and see what happens 🙂
Found it in their change log
– perhaps worthy of a scan…
What else am I missing?
GtD internal mailing list
I’ve enjoyed exploring GtD, but I’ve found in the past that sometimes when I share my enthusiasm for next actions and what not with people, their eyes glaze over. Some people really take a liking to this stuff and some people don’t find it interesting at all. So I’ve wondered in the back of my mind for a while, how can I share my knowledge of GtD with people in my organization without beating them over the head with it and annoying people?
Luckily anybody in my organization can setup an internal mailing list very easily so that’s what I did. And then I announced it on some other peripherally related lists, so that interested folks could opt in if they wanted to and other folks could just ignore it. Perhaps a blog would’ve been an even better choice (it’s more hip at the very least), but this was easier and we’ll see how it works for the time being.
There are almost 50 folks subscribed at this point, which is better than I expected.
Something to consider doing if you want to share best practices with folks in your organization.
Links
Steve Jobs’ 2005 Commencement Speech at Stanford
Pretty interesting and inspirational.
If I had to boil it down to the 10 seconds, I’d say it’s about doing what you love and living you life like every day is your last day.
But like a lot of things, distilling it down to the core removes all the nuances and color and makes it sound cliche, which really it is not. Go ahead and read it, especially if you know that doing what you love is the right thing to do, but you haven’t been doing it, for whatever reason.
Dee Hock quote
Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior.
Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.
— Dee Hock
My latest bash toy: a “cd” replacement
I just made this little cd function that is a drop-in replacement for the builtin bash cd command. The idea was to make it really easy and productive to navigate around to commonly used directories in bash without forcing someone to learn new habits like in the case of pushd, popd, and a bunch of other stuff like cdargs and gotodir.
cd ()
{
if [ "$*" = "" -o "$*" = "-" ]; then
builtin cd $*;
return;
fi;
realpath=$(realpath $*);
if [ -z "$realpath" -o ! -d "$realpath" ]; then
realpath=$(realpath ~/recent_dirs/$* 2> /dev/null);
fi;
if builtin cd $realpath; then
if [ "$*" = "" -o "$*" = "-" ]; then
return;
fi;
ln -s $realpath ~/recent_dirs 2>/dev/null;
else
:;
fi
}