Category: productivity

This is what I like about the internet most. Healthy competition. Free flow of opinions and ideas. I am sure Mr. Pavlina will take this in good sport too. Steve had a nice article sometime back on 10 reasons why one should never work for someone.

Business blog businesspundit.com has a rebuttal post to it. ‘Rob’, the author gives his opinion on each of the 10 points that Steve makes, and dismisses them. He ofcourse, says that these are purely of his own experience. Very nicely written rebuttal. Each point that Steve makes, ‘Rob’ has a comeback.

For instance,

6. Having an evil bovine masterThe flip side of this is you could work for a business genius that teaches you all sorts of lessons in two or three years that it would have taken you ten years to learn on your own. Think about it – if you want to be a value investor would you rather start from scratch or work a few years under Warren Buffett?

Nice.

Check out the whole article here.

Jason, from blackbeltproductivity, has covered an often neglected topic, in a short and sweet post. He covers what you should do, before you have a 1-1 with your leader. It is incredibly important, you prepare for a 1-1. I have very recently noticed this. I actually write down bullets that I want to cover with my boss, before my 1-1. This defenitely helps. One, the boss feels good that, the 1-1 is productive. The second, sometimes the 1-1s just finish faster. Often times, before I have noticed that I waste a lot of time in the 1-1 itself trying to remember something that I wanted to talk about.

Read the post here.

Chris Brogan from Lifehack.org has a great writeup on how to design a good work flow. At some points, it does seem too good to be true. But then isnt every productivity system supposed to tend to ‘Utopia’. He gives a good list of online tools, which can be used to sharpen your workflow, and how to get ‘maximum’ work done. [link]

I just stumbled upon an amazing blog called black belt productivity. Simple amazing. This is all about being productive, and getting your system together. The two authors (Jason and Micheal) do a very impressive job of both giving a lot of info, and yet havng a very nice and clean design to their website.

Besides a lot of things, something work checking out is their very thorough primer of the Getting Things Done (GTD) book by David Allen.

Please do go and visit the site and get impressed yourself.

[link]

Relentless productivity (found through lifehack.org) has a pretty good article, on whether you need 8 hours of sleep. He gives a couple of references to show that, the must-sleep-8-hours is a fallacy. He says that each person has their own sleep requirement. There is also a nice way to experiment and determine your sleep requirement. Try it out yourself.

[link]

Good post in the Blue Flavor Blog about the essentials of email writing. Good points made. The authors talks about how brevity is important, how subject lines decide whether the reader will read the email or not ; and how one should leave the reader with an easily respondable question.

I strongly agree with this. In most cases, I would strongly favor an email asking me something like — “Do you agree with this ? ” — and I would embed my answer into the email. I would not like something like — “What are your thoughts on this ?”, or “Do you think this would work ? ” . Both these require you to put effort into the email, the consequence of which is going to be just a decision. If there is more to be discussed, I would rather expect something like “If you have more thoughts, call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx”.

Check out the post here. [link]

Yoga-bound has a brilliant article (written in first person, by someone teaching us what his teacher taught him) on how to use deep breathing or breath-control (praanayamam) for calming us down, de-stressing, and he even says, filling us up with energy.

[link]

Ok, it has been quite a while since I blogged. Let me see if I can crank up my engine again. 🙂

Do you want a desktop like the above ? Looks very MACish right ? AJ in his blog describes how to get there. He believes that reducing visual clutter can lead to leaps in productivity. I totally agree, and I would also add that it increases the ‘coolness’ factor. This desktop sure looks cool.

[Link]

Hm. No, it is not an oxymoron. You _can_ have productive meetings. Merlin Mann from 43folders lists out 9 tips for effective meetings. Very concisely put. A must read for people who chair meetings.

[link]

First of all, apologies for posting not-so-regularly. Unfortunately, work is taking the better of me these days. I would still update this blog on a semi-regular basis. Please do stay tuned. I am going to try and get the RSS feed of this blog up and running. So you guys can tune in to that too.

As for the subject of this post, I just read an awesome article from New Scientist, which suggests you to sleep on big complex decisions. According to the article “the conscious mind should be trusted only with simple decisions. Complex decisions should be left to the unconscious mind”. I would love that.

Read the full article here.