“Can you bring me my coffee cup off of the charger?” ☕️
Something my grandparents would have never said in their life. Ember Coffee Mug
Excellent advice for creating a happiness memory book.
Every few months, take at least one panorama photo of your kid’s room. At least annually, secretly record your kid talking for at least ten minutes. I promise you’ll treasure both, and then you will curse yourself for not having done each way more often.
Corporate Gym Membership
Salesforce.com is like a gym membership for organizations.
Everyone feels like they need it, it’s aspirational when you sign up, people don’t actually use it, and you can’t bring yourself to cancel your membership because it admits defeat.
Mastering Your Schedule: Conquering Time Confetti and Unlocking Productivity
Many people I coach often express concerns about not having enough time and the consistent feeling of overwhelm. They face a barrage of emails, distracting messages, and back-to-back meetings, leaving little room for deep thinking. Instead of focusing on important objectives, they constantly react to their inbox and calendar.
According to Adam Grant, an expert from The Wharton School of Business, this situation is known as “Time Confetti.” It scatters bits of time everywhere, making it challenging to concentrate and engage in meaningful work. While it may seem like you have no control over your schedule and Time Confetti is unavoidable, there is a way to change that. By carefully planning and managing your calendar proactively, you can take charge of your time.
TAKE ACTION: Starting with the first week of next month, create recurring meetings on your calendar to block out time for focused work and finding your flow. Schedule multiple 90-minute blocks each week and make sure you protect those periods from interruptions.
Here are three things to consider as you implement this approach:
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Find Your Prime Time: Think about when you feel most energized and alert during the day. Identify those moments when you can concentrate and be most productive.
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Collaborate Smartly: Take into account how you work with others. Do you often collaborate with people in different time zones or regions? If so, consider scheduling your deep work sessions to align with those collaborations. For example, you could plan early morning sessions for global teams or adjust your schedule to accommodate teams or customers on the West Coast.
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Tailor Your Plan: Consider the nature of the work you need to do during your deep work sessions. Are you creating sales presentations, writing product documentation, analyzing data, or simply responding to emails? Each type of task may require different times of day, access to information, or collaboration with colleagues.
By intentionally setting aside dedicated time for focused work that suits your strengths and aligns with your collaborations, you can create an environment that enhances productivity and innovation. With proactive calendar management, you can regain control of your schedule and reduce the impact of Time Confetti on your professional life.
More about Time Confetti Adam Grant: How to stop languishing and start finding flow | TED Talk
Performing a mind sweep to unlock faster sleep
Do you often experience a racing mind when trying to fall asleep at night? Are you constantly struggling to calm your thoughts before bedtime?
More delightfully yet, a study by Baylor University psychologist Michael Scullin found that people who created a to-do list fell asleep nine minutes faster, on average, than those who didn’t. (1)
To address this issue, try incorporating a simple yet effective practice into your bedtime routine. Take a moment to sit down with a pen and paper, and jot down the things that occupy your mind the most. Perform a “mind sweep”, capturing all the thoughts and concerns that hold your attention.
By engaging in this process, you can effectively offload your mental burden onto paper, allowing your mind to experience a sense of relief. This practice not only helps in organizing your thoughts but also assists in quieting your mind, making it easier for you to drift into a peaceful sleep.
(1) Wired - Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t
www.oneusefulthing.org/p/setting…
So many important processes assume that the amount and quality of our written output is a useful measure of thoughtfulness, effort, and time.
A professor from NYU said, on one of the nightly news shows, that the written word is no longer the symbol of human thought. Long term this is very true but there will be a short term arbitrage in those that can use AI tools in their work.
Will AI’s accurate code generation slow adoption of new programming languages? A lack of a broad code base for new languages may lead to bias towards existing languages.
Finished reading: The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell 📚(5/5)
I thoroughly enjoy reading and listening to works authored and narrated by Gladwell, and his latest offering does not disappoint. This captivating piece is part podcast and part historical novel, where Gladwell delves into the lives of the men who shaped America’s WWII bombing strategy. Through their moral views and beliefs, Gladwell highlights how their decisions impacted not only the war but also our present-day lives.
Self-Repo Fords
Ford has submitted a patent to automate the vehicle repo processs. www.theverge.com
Those include sending messages to the owner’s smartphone or the vehicle itself, locking drivers out entirely, disabling functions like air conditioning, geofencing drivers to only operate within a certain time or set area so they can still get to work, and in one especially harrowing example, enabling an autonomous car to just drive itself to an impound lot — or a junkyard if the car’s market value is determined to be below a certain threshold.
Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you
Finished reading: Authentic by Paul Van Doren 📚(4/5)
The making of the Vans shoe. If you enjoy books about how businesses are built, skate culture, and a bit about life in SoCal in the 60-80’s this a fun quick read/listen.
Finished reading: Taste by Stanley Tucci 📚(4/5)
Enjoyable audiobook read with the gentle and smooth voice of Stanley Tucci himself. Parts of the book ran long, but the penultimate chapter was a shock to me and put the whole book into a new context. A book about the love of food turned into a book about gratitude in a wonderful way.
Finished reading: The Man Who Knew the Way to the Moon by Todd Zwillich 📚(4/5) an Audible Original.
“The story of John C. Houbolt, an unsung hero of Apollo 11 and the man who showed NASA how to put America on the moon.” It’s the story of determination, achievement, perseverance, and the struggle for recognition. Doing the right thing isn’t always rewarded at the time we feel it should be.
For the first time in my life, I heard a radio station play the same song twice in a row, and not for any type of marathon. Santeria (song) - Wikipedia. Odd.
7 marathons - 7 Continents - 7 Days
David Kilgore just ran—and won—seven marathons in seven days on seven continents. The 31-year-old American runner averaged about 2:56 per marathon, which means he ran 183.4 miles at 6:43 pace per mile.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Remarkable
Kottke.org - New Massive Image of the Milky Way with 3.32 Billion Individual Objects
It’s impossible to wrap my mind around this.
Tonight the NBC Nightly News had a story about a woman who found her father’s bucket list after he was killed in a distracted driver accident. The list included about 60 items of which about 6 where already completed. When she found the list she felt compelled to finish the bucket list and in doing so found new strength inside her as well as a connection to her father. She finished the list in about 5 years.
NBC Nightly News - Daughter honors late father by finishing his bucket list
As I watched this episode I thought about how this father’s bucket list was like a treasure map. It was a plan laid out for someone to follow. It gave the daughter a plan to act upon without struggling to think of her own bucket list (though she may have had one).
Is this a bad thing, to have a challenge laid out before you? Probably not, who knows if she would have accomplished her own bucket list in just a few years without the impetus or challenge from her father.
So the lesson here is to take the leap, find a list, any list and get started.
Wired - Robot Cars Are Causing 911 False Alarms in San Francisco
In a letter filed with a California regulator yesterday, city agencies complained that on three separate occasions since December, Cruise staff called 911 after a passenger in one of its driverless vehicles became “unresponsive” to the two-way voice link installed in each car. Each time, police and firefighters rushed to the scene but found the same thing: a passenger who had fallen asleep in their robot ride.
Now that is some confidence in self driving taxis, or just a few folks sleeping one off.
Finished reading: PSYCHOLOGY OF MONEY. by MORGAN. HOUSEL 📚 (4/5)
Great money lessons best summed up by:
- Build wealth by saving more
- Save by more spending less than you make
- Spend less by desiring less
- Desire less by not caring what other people think
Simple is not always easy
Savage Waters on Outside+
Watched Savage Waters on Outside+ (4/5)
Savage Waters is an adventure to find an awe inspiring wave recorded in E. F. Knight’s personal journal in 1891. The film wonderfully captures our desire to connect to the wonders of our world across generations. From the journal…
“When we were close to it, the sea happened to break, and the sight was a lovely yet a terrible one. A huge green roller, very high and steep, suddenly rose as if by magic from the deep; then swept over the shoal, and, when it reached the shallowest part its crest hung over, forming a cavern underneath, through whose transparent roof the sun shone with a beautiful green light; and lastly the mass overtopping itself fell with a great hollow sound, and was dashed to pieces in a whirl of hissing foam.”
The Cruise of the “Alerte” by E.F. Knight
Savage Waters - Official Trailer on Vimeo
The Cruise of the ‘Alerte’: Knight, E. F. on Amazon (Affiliate)