Productivity

 ï¿½Judge the value of what you have by what you had to give...

The principle of an opportunity cost does not at first glance seem hard to understand. If you spend half an hour noodling around on Twitter, when you would otherwise have been reading a book, the lost book-reading time is the opportunity cost of the tweeting. If you decide to buy a fancy belt for £100 instead of a cheaper one for £20, the opportunity cost is the £80 shirt you could otherwise have bought. Everything has a cost: whatever you were going to do instead, but couldn’t. [...] We wo...

 80/20 Rule for Production VS Consumption

As James explains, you can read everything you want about waking up earlier—from sleep habits to the Circadian rhythm—but when the alarm goes off, the only thing that matters are the strategies you’ve actually tried. “The biggest issue around the myth of ‘I need to learn more’ is that somehow learning and doing are mutually exclusive. And they’re not at all. You should certainly be taking in new information and exploring continually. But you also need to be exploiting the information that yo...

 Focus on Producing Information, Not Consuming

The production of information is critical to a healthy information diet. It's the thing that makes it so that your information consumption has purpose. I cannot think of more important advice to give anyone: start your day with a producer mindset, not a consumer mindset. If you begin your day checking the news, checking your email, and checking your notifications, you've launched yourself into a day of grazing a mindless consumption. [...] But there's something else that being a producer do...

 Government Internet Shutdown Mobilized the Masses

The government could have been smarter. The best way to divert our youth from politics would have been to give them free, unlimited internet access a few days before the protests, and drop the price of beer and condoms – all the while playing “Be safe, live long” songs on the radios. The youngies would have been watching porn, WhatsApping and YouTubing, and would have been too distracted to think about politics. Shutting down the internet achieved the opposite. Far from limiting youth mobili...

 The Collector�s Fallacy and Tsundoku

One of my favorite Japanese words is tsundoku (???). Aside from being a fantastic pun, I think it’s captures our shared problem pretty well: “Tsundoku” is the condition of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them. Buying books does not equal reading books. We all know that. Yet, so many end up victims of tsundoku anyway. Why? One problem, I think, is that collecting feels like learning. Each time we discover a new productivity toy, internet artic...

 You were never actually accomplishing anything by watchin...

If you ask someone what they accomplish by watching the news, you’ll hear vague notions like, “It’s our civic duty to stay informed!” or “I need to know what’s going on in the world,” or “We can’t just ignore these issues,” none of which answer the question. “Being informed” sounds like an accomplishment, but it implies that any information will do. You can become informed by reading a bus schedule. A month after you’ve quit the news, it’s hard to name anything useful that’s been lost. It b...

 Most current-events-related conversations are just people...

“Because it helps you participate in everyday conversations!” is a weak but at least meaningful answer to the “What is accomplished” question. But when you quit playing the current events game, and observe others talking about them, you might notice that almost nobody really knows what they’re talking about. There is an extraordinary gulf between having a functional understanding of an issue, and the cursory glance you get from the news. If you ever come across a water-cooler conversation on...

 Idea Debt

Idea Debt is when you spend too much time picturing what a project is going to be like, too much time thinking about how awesome it will be to have this thing done and in the world, too much time imagining how cool you will look, how in demand you’ll be, how much money you’ll make. And way too little time actually making the thing. If… You tell 15 friends about your screenplay idea, but devote zero time in your week to facing the blank screen. You buy a domain name, spend weeks or months rese...

 Five Ways to Stretch Your Perception of Time

1. Keep learning Learning new things is a pretty obvious way to pass your brain new information on a regular basis. If you’re constantly reading, trying new activities or taking courses to learn new skills, you’ll have a wealth of ‘newness’ at your fingertips to help you slow down time. 2. Visit new places A new environment can send a mass of information rushing to your brain—smells, sounds, people, colors, textures. Your brain has to interpret all of this. Exposing your brain to new envir...