Sometimes the best teaching comes from a Beginner’s Mind — A few days ago I was talking with a friend about her upcoming presentation to a business networking group. “They want me to talk about how to do Instagram Reels!” she said, sounding annoyed. “That makes sense,” I nodded. “When I hosted their social media group, that was the number…

I started time logging for the data — but I’m staying for the surprising side effects. — It’s all Tara McMullin’s fault. I’ve been digging into her book What Works, which sneakily hides in the “goal setting and productivity” genre while really being a viciously accurate analysis and dissection of the whole hustle culture late-stage capitalism world we find ourselves in. It’s the kind of book that…

Improving your productivity can be simple. — I have two timers on my desk. They serve the same purpose: pomodoros, those 20-minute deep-work sessions named after a tomato. One is beautifully analog — an industrial looking gray-and-black twist-dial mechanism that I’ve cranked so many times that it’s no longer really accurate to within more than three or…

It wasn’t my first lesson in gender roles, but it was the most clear. — Thanksgiving in the bicentennial year of 1976 was extra fun. I was seven years old, and my Dad, who worked in law enforcement, had taken us to his partner’s house. The sound of monster movies on channel 9 mingled with the aromas of turkey, stuffing, canned cranberry sauce and my…

It’s still going to suck. But with a little preparation, it can suck less. — The good news: we’d finally gotten a really good mattress, and there was a much better chance that my partner and I could improve our sleep. The bad news: that first night on the new mattress, my brain did not want me to go to sleep. I lay there for…

If you plan for the points of failure, you can handle any situation — just ask the Stoics. — “Just so you all know, my notes aren’t showing on this laptop…” The presenter gave a nervous laugh. Ouch, I thought. If only she’d had a printout… Her presentation was actually really good; it’s possible that the raw authenticity that going noteless gives a speaker lent more power as she…

Finding tactics to help you thrive in a time-blurred world. — “Hang on a minute,” my coworker said through the zoom. “I need to take care of this now, or it won’t get done.” I nodded and sat back in my office chair. “I get it. Let me know when you’re done.” The task was small, tedious, and crucial to the…

Is this the mythical “passive income”? — I’ve been having a bit of a writing renaissance with Medium over the past several months. Last year I embarked on an ambitious project: Write one article a day for a year. It was motivated by this article by @Khadejah, and it had interesting results: I more than doubled my…

I was looking for shared experiences, but fell into positive psychology instead. At a small performing arts festival I went to recently I was excited to see that they had dedicated all of an afternoon to an “Open Space” format. It’s a kind of “unconference” with a brilliantly simple structure that enables the attendees to create the agenda on-the-fly and explore whatever…