Years ago, when I lived in Princeton, NJ, I was sitting in Small World Coffee on Nassau Street writing in my journal when a neighbor stopped at my table to chat. I didn’t really want to talk…
A Man Called Ove
I watched this movie last week and was really taken by it. It’s in Swedish, and while I sometimes find watching a movie with subtitles off-putting, I didn’t have a problem with it in this case. The protagonist, Ove, is a cranky, isolated retiree who spends his days enforcing the rules of his neighborhood association…
The Emergency Powers of the President
I was both alarmed and puzzled by a piece I saw on the New York Times website yesterday about “secret emergency powers of the president.” The essay, by former Colorado governor Gary Hart, is titled “How Powerful Is the President?” Hart writes that there are “at least a hundred documents authorizing extraordinary presidential powers in the case of a national emergency, virtually dictatorial powers without congressional or judicial checks and balances.”…
Cal Newport on Confronting the Productivity Dragon
I’m keeping it simple today, just sharing a link to a blog post by Cal Newport on how best to manage the avalanche of work demands that descend on knowledge workers each day through email, phone calls and Zoom meetings…
Smartphones and a Loss of Creativity
When neural scanning technologies were developed that allowed the workings of the human brain to be observed in real time, neuroscientists were surprised by how active the brain is when nothing much is going on. . . It seems that when our mind is wandering, when we’re daydreaming, when we’re just plain bored, valuable things are happening in our heads that boost our ability to be creative and solve problems…
Smartphones and an Inability to Focus
I’ve become convinced that smartphones, notwithstanding how handy they are, are training us not to be able to focus deeply on any one thing. I’m also convinced that an ability to focus is important for our effectiveness, our ability to learn, the quality of our relationships, and our overall peace of mind.
When I got my first iPhone…
Mining the Gold on Disney+
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I subscribed to the new Disney+ streaming service so Jennifer and I could watch the filmed version of the Broadway musical Hamilton. Then, with 29 days of our one-month subscription left to go, we started watching The Mandalorian, a Star Wars-based TV series. We’re three episodes into it…
My Email Management Saga – Part 3
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…
My Email Management Saga – Part 2
Yesterday I described how I managed my to-do list in the early days of email. Some of the workarounds I came up with were no longer necessary after my company migrated to Microsoft Outlook because the developers of Outlook included nifty features that allow users to convert emails into tasks and manage them as part of their overall to-do list…
My Email Management Saga – Part 1
When I was in my 20s I had a steel-trap memory, but that started to change in my 30s. As my memory became less reliable I felt increasingly at risk of embarrassing myself by forgetting to do something I had promised to do. That made me intensely interested in learning how to keep track of everything I was responsible for without relying so much on my memory…