Betterment

You’ve heard of the seven-year-itch. It’s the sense of restlessness or dissatisfaction that supposedly sets in after you’ve been with someone for seven years of time. It’s most often talked about in the context of romantic relationships but is also applied to one’s “relationship” with something like a job or place. While the seven-year-itch is […]

The alphabet is a miracle, one that is compounded by books. And the lessons we learn from this cornerstone of modern culture apply to organizations, meetings, tech, politics and almost everything w…

My way of thinking about long-term habit building

Upon seeing the adult world in detail, teens often lament “But it’s all so boring!” And in a standard trope of fiction, a spark of art infuses life, energy, and vitality into dull adults whose lives have lost all meaning. (E.g. recent movie Living.) Both groups agree: the world is far more boring than it need be. But why?

Toxic productivity culture and trying to optimize every moment of our day has let to largest mental health epidemic ever recorded.

In 1965, CEOs at the top 350 publicly owned US firms made 20 times as much as their average employee. In 2021, they made 400 times as much. This dramatic

In 1979, the page-a-day calendar was born. It’s basically a book on its side, but the user rips off a page each day. My friend Michael Cader took this concept and ran with it, creating calend…

Last summer I created a Drafts action for a user to allow them to mark some text in IA writer’s Markdown syntax for a highlight. Now my solution was not the first solution offered, but it was a little different to the others, and I have been meaning to write it up for quite some time now to go into a bit more detail about how it works and the benefits it provides over other, existing solutions.

A myth, once circulated, can last a long time. That’s because our cognitive machines are rife with glitches. (The existence of these glitches is the

Twenty years ago, it didn’t seem like a burdensome task to write a handwritten letter to a loved one. Fifteen years ago, it wasn’t a big deal to write a long email to a friend. Today, it can feel hard to motivate yourself to tap out a two line response to a text. The feeling […]

What I got from creating a visual representation of my career and the things I’ve learned over time

Find Out What 10x Developers Don’t Want You To Know

Say you want to learn French. Would you do better if you studied for 100 hours in a year-long course (~2 hours per week) or if those hours were compressed into a month (~20 hours per week)? Surprisingly, the answer seems to be that more intensive language education programs do better! This appears to be […]

The way we think about our priorities makes a huge difference. Leaders of every stripe make one thing more than any other: decisions. In any environment with constraints (which is, actually, any en…

The world changes and we have a choice: • Fight hard to keep it the way it was. • Notice what happened and then decide to do something with that insight. Thirty years ago, AOL was my company’…

It’s not hypocritical to help yourself at a buffet at the same time you counsel the owner of the restaurant to limit the number of trips that people take so that the restaurant can become sus…

While “labyrinth” is sometimes used to describe a deliberately confusing maze with branching passages and dead ends, a classical labyrinth has a single clear path to the center and back out again. This “unicursal” pattern has existed since ancient times and shows up in cultures around the world. It’s been etched onto pottery, carved into […]

Achieving one important thing a day is more than most people accomplish.

If you’re building a long-term notes repository, you may want to consider syncing it with git [https://git-scm.com/]. In this video, we discuss how to set up Obsidian [https://obsidian.md]to sync between your devices automatically using git and GitHub. Updated: December 2021 At the time of

The thing that your product or service delivers could be called performance, and it’s made of two components: –The story and expectations and cultural impact of what you do (the story).…

Technique created by Alberto Brandolini that helps to understand more clearly the domain of the applications through the events generated…

Clients and customers can be frustrating. Perhaps they don’t know what you know. Perhaps they don’t care. It’s possible to educate and inspire. It might be more productive to find…

Get to, want to and have to are an endless braid. How much of our time do we spend on each? Have to is often up to someone else. The things we’re required to do by the system or the people in…

Finding a trademark look might be the best style move you make this year. Read more on the Journal.

For quite some time, my own ops haven't had much dev in them. But I'm changing that.

Getting started with the Templater Obsidian plugin? Here’s a list of commands to experiment with. After creating this video about the plug-ins I’m currently using, I mentioned Templater quite a bit. And so, I created a list of commands I’ve used to systemize my vault. Keep in mind, Templater has the