I wrote yesterday that my enthusiasm for my retirement gig of the last few years — showing people how to deal with email overwhelm — has waned because nothing I teach my clients can fully overcome the root problem facing knowledge workers today: too much email. That problem is largely a function of how companies use email…
Category: Books
Ubiquitous Capture
I blogged last week about Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a book of advice for would-be writers. I finished reading it yesterday. One chapter that resonated with me, called “Index Cards,” describes how Lamott jots down any observations or insights that might later inform her writing. “Whenever I am leaving the house without my purse…”
The Hardest Job in the World
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about how John Dickerson described Dwight D. Eisenhower as a “life hacker” in an early chapter of his new book, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency. Yesterday I finished the book, and I’d recommend it to anyone who is interested in the nature of the U.S. presidency or the overall state of American governance. As the title suggests, Dickerson asserts that the American presidency has become really hard — so hard, in fact, that no one person can do it well…
Bird by Bird
When a friend of mine learned that I was writing a blog, she read some of my posts and then told me that she admired my commitment to improve my writing and that I was well on my way, but that I might want to consider taking a writing course. Oof, right? But even though I can be a little thin-skinned, I found that her suggestion didn’t sting . . .
The Efficiency Paradox
I just finished reading The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can’t Do, by Edward Tenner. It wasn’t a compelling book. I struggled with what I might say about it and was tempted not to bother, but finally decided that since I’d spent hours reading it, I wanted to at least get a blog post out…
So Good They Can’t Ignore You
I have email subscriptions to only a small number of blogs and newsletters, but one that I read faithfully is Cal Newport’s. As a graduate student Newport started a blog called Study Hacks in which he offered advice to students on how to succeed in school. The scope of the blog has since expanded beyond advising students. Today it offers insights to anyone interested in performing “productive, valuable and meaningful work in an increasingly distracted digital age.” . . .
Ike Was a Life Hacker
This week I started reading John Dickerson’s new book, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency. I’m enjoying it. One of the insights Dickerson offers early in the book is that Dwight D. Eisenhower was what we would today call a life hacker. “He thought about not just what he did but how he did it,” Dickerson writes, “and developed systems to make himself more efficient.” . . .
Countdown 1945
I just finished reading a new book by Chris Wallace and Mitch Weiss called Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days That Changed the World. I was drawn to it because last year I read Nigel Hamilton’s FDR at War series, a three-volume history of Roosevelt’s conduct of WWII as Commander in Chief. That series ends with the death of FDR, but the war continued for another four months, and I thought Countdown 1945 would be a way of following it through to its conclusion. It was that and more . . .
A World Without Work, Part 2
Yesterday I described the case made in Daniel Susskind’s new book, A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond, that we are headed toward a future in which there will be many fewer paying jobs than there are people to do them. Today I’ll discuss the proposals Susskind makes for ameliorating the effects of that scarcity of jobs . . .
A World Without Work, Part 1
I just finished reading Daniel Susskind’s new book, A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond. Susskind, an economist, believes that the ability of computers and robots to displace human workers will gradually become so pervasive as to require a complete rethinking of how the fruits of our economy are distributed . . .