Okay, the Discrete Math class I’m taking is kicking my ass. I did pretty well during the first half of the course, but now the amount of work is intensifying. I’m learning lots, but is it really possible to work full time, take classes, blog, and still have a fabulous designer life? I’m beginning to wonder how successful one can be doing all four.

Are any of you working and schooling at the same time? How do you manage your time and the increased anxiety? Please share your tips. I need your help!

Posted in: School, Time Management, Work

You’ve got at least one Big Project on your someday list, or at least in the back of your mind: that novel/painting/web start-up/symphony you’ve always wanted to tackle “when the time is right.” One day, you tell yourself, when there’s a nice long lull, you’ll get to it, but until then it’s nose-to-the-grindstone on more immediate concerns…

Face it: the only nice long lull most of us will ever see is dea…retirement.

To be clear, this is a project you would really like to do (or have done) but because it doesn’t directly affect your paycheck and it doesn’t have a real deadline, it keeps getting postponed.

Here’s a simple way to start making real daily progress on a daunting creative project no matter how busy you are.

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I’m a stationery nerd. I can’t resist poring over the shelves of office supply stores for unusual items that might fit a tricky niche in my productivity lifestyle.

Occasionally I strike gold. For instance, this weekend I discovered Pacon‘s exellent blank tagboard flash cards. They come in boxes of 1,000 in an assortment of 5 colors. Each flash card is 3″ x 2″.

The cards are designed for study purposes, but for a productivity nerd they suggest a variety of other interesting uses. Smaller than index cards, they lend themselves to a single thought, task, or other concrete item each.

On the drive back from a weekend spent out of town, I pondered various ways to take advantage of my nifty new cards (which I’ve nicknamed “shorties”). I came up with a few possibilities, but here’s my favorite.

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Posted in: notetaking, shorties, tasks

Being a designer is a curse. Why? Because everything around you looks like crap. That includes menus, signs, websites, business cards, and worst of all, greeting cards. Go down the greeting card aisle in any drugstore, and you’ll soon be overloaded with banal cartoons, flowers, and kittens. And don’t even get me started on the typography.

So where can you find tasteful greeting cards that don’t gouge out the eyes?

Try these independent greeting card printers and designers. They won’t have the Hallmark crown on the back. But that’s a good thing.

Binth

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Posted in: Design, Notecards

I’ve been a little quiet lately and just wanted to let you know I haven’t fell off the face of the earth. Although I hate talking about myself, here’s what I’ve been up to and why I haven’t posted very much recently:

I’ve decided to continue my edumacation and am taking a course at Stanford, in addition to my full job. The class is called Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science. It’s challenging class, since I’m terrible with math and haven’t been in school for about five years.

I took my midterm yesterday, so the big hurdle is over, and I now intend to get back on writing posts regularly.

I’ve also been doing some work behind the scenes on a super-secret redesign of LifeClever. So if I’m quiet, it means I’m furiously working on improving the site.

If you’ve got feedback (bad and good) during this redesign process, let us know in the comments.

Thanks for sticking with us. And don’t hesitate to let us know what you want to see more of.

Posted in: Administrivia

It’s an oft-quoted truism in books on learning and productivity that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve true mastery in any skill, from composing symphonies to playing tennis.

Is it true? I have absolutely no idea. It’s certainly an appealing concept, though. We’re used to thinking of genius as an elusive, magical thing that springs fully formed. Boiling down Mozart’s greatness to a regime of dozens of hours a week at the piano until he he’d hit the 10,000-hour mark (before his voice changed) makes the idea of learning to play the piano seem more approachable. It gives you a sense of the distance between point A and point B.

Still, at the rate of 20 or 30 minutes every week or two when you’re feeling restless won’t add up to even Yanni-level playing any time this decade.

Let’s take the baby steps approach.

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Posted in: learning, mastery, practice, skills

Divination is the art of foretelling the future through the interpretation of seemingly random signs. For instance, hieromancy is the art of divination using animal entrails. (I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what kind of entrails are involved in anthropomancy.)

Clearly, ancient peoples had even more anxiety about how they were going to spend their day. Without a clear roadmap, they were apt to turn to the nearest crystal ball, a pre-Gutenberg version of a Filofax.

Personally, there are days I’d rather be elbow-deep in cow guts than take another scan through my to-do list. At least a good hieromancer would give you a clear answer, from “the crops will be good this year” to “you will crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women!“

This got me thinking: perhaps the lessons of divination can be applied to productivity…

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Posted in: anxiety, deadlines, Productivity, tasks

You’re about to ask your boss for a raise.

You’ve got a big pitch meeting with a potential client in five minutes.

It’s time to negotiate your first home purchase.

The adrenaline’s pumping. The stakes are high. You’ve got all the salient points of your argument down pat, your various counter-arguments holstered, and you’re ready to give ‘em hell.

Then you open the door, shake some hands, and your body shifts into fight-or-flight mode. Your conscious, analytic mind shuts down.

Like a battle, an intense personal interaction is too demanding to properly think about what you’re doing as you do it. You just act, shoot from the hip, work from your instincts. All your preparation goes out the window.

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Posted in: meetings, presentations, speeches

After marveling at Michelangelo’s statue of Goliath-vanquishing [David,][1] the Pope asked the sculptor, “How do you know what to cut away?”

Michelangelo’s reply? “It’s simple. I just remove everything that doesn’t look like David.”

While I’m not totally sure of its accuracy, the conversation still offers three very sage design lessons:

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Posted in: Design, Process

Del.icio.us was a big discovery for me. The ability to access my bookmarks anywhere, share them with others, and discover my friends’ favorites: Wow!

But I had a moment of truth the day I clicked a months-old bookmark only to discover that one of my favorite pages on Web design had vanished. D’oh! I’d really depended on that material! Suddenly apprehensive, I started going through all of my del.icio.us links one-by-one, discovering that a large percentage had vanished off the face of the Web.

It felt almost like I’d had a hard drive failure. Only then did I realize how much I’d come to depend on Web-based content.

Sure, for finding the odd missing page, there’s always Archive.org, but that saves pages intermittently and it’s a fairly clunky solution for an ongoing problem. What I really needed was a social bookmarking service that cached a full version of each bookmarked page with all the graphics and formatting intact.

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Posted in: archiving, bookmarking

Hey, you. Yeah, you, the one reading this post instead of working.

You need sleep. Seven to eight hours. Really. More than exercise. More than your weekly review. More than World of Warcraft.

How many times have you read an article in some magazine about a Tony Robbins-obsessed CEO who claims to get up at 4 AM seven days a week so that they can hit the treadmill before their 8 am morning staff meeting?

Notice how it’s those same CEOs who embezzle the company’s retirement fund and flee to a remote tropical island?

In this country, sleep deprivation is synonymous with power and success. Winners don’t need sleep, right? Edison claimed to sleep 4 hours a night. He was also wildly unethical and electrocuted an elephant. Draw your own conclusions.

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If you read productivity blogs and self-help books regularly, you’ve probably gotten something useful out of them.

Maybe you’ve gotten rid of some bad habits, or organized your desk (and kept it that way).

Maybe you lost weight, or quit smoking, or developed a better relationship with your spouse.

On the other hand, you’ve almost certainly failed many times more than you’ve succeeded. Implemented systems only to drop them, tried diet techniques and failed, struggled to shift your sleep schedule around and snoozed all three alarms.

If you’re teaching a rat a behavior, like pushing a lever or completing a maze, giving it a piece of cheese each time will help. But if you really want that rat to learn something cold, you’ll give it cheese once, then no cheese a couple of times, then another cheese, then maybe a three-cheese break before a third cheese.

Intermittent reward is the most powerful form of behavior modification. That’s why gambling is so popular. By making rewards unpredictable, they become far more satisfying to the subject when they are given, making the behavior in question much more ingrained.

See the parallel? This is why we become productivity junkies. When a few systems and techniques are helpful here and there, we are inexorably drawn to try each new one as it appears whether we need it or not.

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Posted in: Lifehacks, Productivity, relaxation

It happens all the time. You start with the best of intentions. You’ve implemented your new productivity system or habit, you have a clear, manageable set of tasks, a strong goal, all the motivation in the world.

Then, the lightning bolt. Suddenly, your energy and willpower drains out of your body. You slump forward, a limp, unmotivated mess. It isn’t a physical exhaustion, although you certainly feel tired, but rather an emotional and mental exhaustion, a fog that feels too heavy to lift.

“Damn it,” you think to yourself. “Here I am with a solid hour to write that book chapter and I all-of-a-sudden don’t want to do anything but watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer until one in the morning. I was jazzed on the commute home. What happened?”

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Posted in: diet, Lifehacks, Motivation, willpower

It’s that happy-joy-joy time of the year again. Yes, Macworld Expo kicks off next week in San Francisco on January 15th. Steve will be delivering the keynote, and is expected to entice Apple fans with a new mouthwatering product. The rumor mills are abuzz with whispers of an overhaul to Apple’s notebook line and the launch of an ultra-portable Macbook. Sweet!

Don’t have passes yet? You can still get a free exhibit pass here.

If you can’t make it in person, check out live coverage at Mac Rumors Live.

So are you going? Do you believe the rumors? What are your predictions for MacWorld?

Photo by acaben

Posted in: Apple, Macworld

In his excellent book, Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger quotes Socrates, who suggested we “carve nature at its joints.” In other words, when categorizing, we should look for natural distinctions to make before inventing our own.

When I first became interested in productivity, I tried simplifying my life with a better system. I tried to build every possibility into the system so that it became a sort of artificial intelligence, figuring out what I needed to do and handing me one discretely packaged 20-minute-or-less-task at a time. Every task had a duration, a start date, an end date, a priority, tags, notes, an associated project…insanity!

Today, I simplify my system for a better life. The fewer steps (and the fewer arbitrary distinctions), the better.

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Posted in: Lifehacks

It’s tough keepin’ up with the gluttony of “insanely great” Mac utilities. Everyday, VersionTracker lists scores of new apps ready to tweak, optimize, and organize all the crap on your computer. For the most part, I ignore them. Usually, they’re so buggy and poorly designed, I just send them straight to trash after trying them out.

But there are always exceptions.

I’ve just discovered a utility that I now can’t live without. It’s called 1Password, and I’ll never ever throw it in the trash. So what does it do? Here’s the tagline straight from the developer’s website:

“1Password keeps track of all web passwords, automates sign-in, guards from identity theft.”

In other words, it’s the Barry Bonds of password management utilities, injecting your Keychain with a little something extra to hit a home run. It does the basics like storing web passwords, forms, and identity information. Where 1Password really flexes it’s muscle, however, is how smoothly it lets you access that information. Direct browser integration, automatic form submissions, and synchronization all make this a must-have app for any Mac user.

Being a curmudgeony 27-year-old, I was naturally skeptical. “Great, yet another password management utility,” I thought. But after trying it out, I’m now a believer. It has just the right amount of nifty, effective, and useful features. Here are the ones I love:

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Posted in: Mac OS X, Security, Software