A little faster is a market advantage. A step change in speed changes the market entirely. Fedex was faster mail. It allowed them to grow and profit. Email, on the other hand, completely changed co…

Robot owls: "The question that remains in my mind," writes Imogen West-Knights in the latest issue of The Dial, "and in the minds of many of even its most dedicated users, is: what is Duolingo actually teaching you?" (Emphasis mine.) What indeed? Duolingo won't make you fluent in a foreign

Remember the iPod? The missing link between the Sony Walkman and the Apple iPhone that changed how we experienced music forever. Back in 2006, a viral

Learn how to organize your digital life in seconds. Stop wasting time looking for information and gain greater focus on what matters most.

5S is a workplace organization method that uses a list of five Japanese words: seiri (整理), seiton (整頓), seisō (清掃), seiketsu (清潔), and shitsuke (躾). These have been translated as 'sort', 'set in order', 'shine', 'standardize', and 'sustain'. The list describes how to organize a work space for efficiency and effectiveness by identifying and sorting the items used, maintaining the area and items, and sustaining the new organizational system. The decision-making process usually comes from a dialogue about standardization, which builds understanding among employees of how they should do the work.

Since I was born, the planet has invented 6 billion jobs. Technology is said to threaten the replacement of human labor, yet, somehow we’ve found useful activities for a rapidly growing popul…

Here’s the truth about feeling like you’re not a good enough programmer…

Forecasting is both art and science, reliant on both rigor and luck—but you can develop a mindset that anticipates and plans ahead.

For the last two weeks, my weather app has informed me that there’s a real risk (in this case, wildfires). But, after a few days, that’s not severe weather. That’s just weather. (…

As might be expected given my renewed focus on productivity, I was pretty productive this month—especially at home, which was a bit of a weakness in my old system.

How to volunteer this season without getting your ear talked off by Linda from accounting.

In my ongoing efforts to draft a book on engineering strategy, I’ve finally reached the point where I need to transition “Wardley Mapping” from a topic to consider including into a topic that I either do or do not include. The first step on that line is getting much deeper at understanding how it works. This is rather different than systems modeling, which is a technique I’ve been using off-and-on at work for 15-plus years, but I will make a solid go at it.

Switching between reading and editing modes in Obsidian with ease: a simple home-made plugin that brings intentional editing to my note-taking workflow.

My mentor is a colleague 20 years my junior. How is that possible?

Dear Ruben, When I read this question, my initial thought was that the kid who wrote this has nothing to worry about, they’re going to be...

Here in the US, when we hear “Michelin”, gold stars in haute cuisine and Michelin-Star restaurants come to mind.  But Michelin is not a food company, it’s

Insights from ten classic books on productivity, a continuing series on my year-long Foundations reading project.

This is from a new archival source—the original WikiWikiWeb.

Not all needs have a market (yet). A market is a category. A market is a place with competition. In a market, people have habits and budgets and social pressure to engage. There are buyers and sell…

It’s a way to offer connection or acknowledgment. It’s a recognition of feedback and the time it took someone to consider us. We can use it after we share something important, or someon…

“If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.” ― Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) Most of us know the Thanksgiving story: Pilgrims,

Strategies for Thriving on Your Own

How to build developer tools for happiness and productivity.

There’s a French postmodern philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, who made a big splash in the late 20th Century with his two big ideas about how information

Bernard Arnault didn’t just build LVMH, he created new rules for luxury.  Most stories are about the deals – how he acquired Christian Dior, Moet &

Pete Warden is the kind of fellow you would run into at the old eTech conference or at Foo Camp—an old-school engineer who is equally at home hacking hardware and writing code in the latest languag…

Who is “I” and how does that “I” have the power to change the mind in question? What actually happens is this: A person cares enough to have experiences Those experiences ch…

Our culture is filled with man-made traps, situations worth avoiding. They have three elements: They’re seductive. Traps offer a benefit and they make it easy to walk in. They are hard to get…