CJ Hauser in The Guardian:
But once I gave up on the banterers, my Tinder chats became uniform. The conversations read like a liturgy: where are you from, how do you like our weather, how old is your dog, what are your hobbies, what is your job, oh no an English teacher better watch my grammar winkyfacetongueoutfacenerdyglassesface. The conversations all seemed the same to me: pro forma, predictable, even robotic.
That’s when I realised that what I was doing amounted to a kind of Turing test.
Panos Athanasopoulos says bilinguals view the world in different ways depending on the specific language they are operating in.
Hans Brattberg from Crisp shares his mindmap.
A Quora user asked for the best productivity apps for Mac OS. Here’s my answer:
There are of course the big productivity suites like OmniFocus and Things but I want to focus on the small helpers that save me several hours per week.
My number one pick is BetterTouchTool. It’s a small, free application that lets you map actions to various forms of input. Some of the trackpad shortcuts I use all the time:
You can also define application specific shortcuts:
You see the pattern. The tab switching is something I add to every app I’m using on a regular basis. Similar to going back and forth in history (Finder, Spotify, …).
You can also trigger actions from the keyboard, a normal and a magic mouse, an apple remote, Leap and from the BTT iOS app.
Hazel is another tool I’m using on a daily basis. Well, I’m not actively using it. It’s running in the background doing its fantastic job.
Hazel asks you for folders to monitor. You can then define rules to apply on the files in this folder.
Some examples of my Hazel rules:
(This is the folder in which my ScanSnap document scanner dumps all the PDFs it creates.)
Alfred is a launcher that you invoke with a keyboard shortcut. It can do many helpful things like find files, eject volumes, quit programs. It also lets you define search engines so you don’t have to open/navigate to your browser to start your search.
You can define complex actions, called workflows, or download shared ones. My favorite one searches LEO (one of the best German English/French/Spanish/Chinese/… dictionaries) and shows the results in Alfred.
Ev Williams:
The job of leadership is to foster alignment and enthusiasm toward the right goal.
Jeff Bezos:
And the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was a, […] what I call though what only a nerd would call, a regret minimization framework. So I wanted to project myself forward to age eighty, and so came out looking back on my life, I wanna have minimized the number of regrets I have.
I love this.
Joseph Stromberg:
This research has produced a number of specific tips: things you should do — or not do — to maximize the effectiveness of the hours you spend working. Here’s a brief guide.
Matt Yglesias explains where time zones come from and how we get rid of them.
Joel Runyon quotes advice he’s been given by Perry Marshall:
All you really need to do is three things:
- Commit to something
- Put your balls on the line
- Then figure it out
That’s all there is to it.
Joe Buhlig describes his OmniFocus setup. Like Sven Fechner I especially enjoyed reading the part on contexts. Many of my contexts are quite similar. I never liked the name of my “Weekend” context and happily adapted Joe’s “After Work”.
Elizabeth Bernstein’s article explains how we make decisions:
Psychology researchers have studied how people make decisions and concluded there are two basic styles. “Maximizers” like to take their time and weigh a wide range of options—sometimes every possible one—before choosing. “Satisficers” would rather be fast than thorough; they prefer to quickly choose the option that fills the minimum criteria (the word “satisfice” blends “satisfy” and “suffice”). […]
“The maximizer is kicking himself because he can’t examine every option and at some point had to just pick something,” Dr. Schwartz says. “Maximizers make good decisions and end up feeling bad about them. Satisficers make good decisions and end up feeling good.”
I’m a maximizer. Because I know that I can’t examine every option I try to find the minimum problem set that needs a decision at the moment.
Chanpory Rith cites a parable from Art and Fear:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot”albeit a perfect one”to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work”and learning from their mistakes”the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Henrik Kniberg also wrote “Lean from the Trenches”, a great book about agile development.
Mauricio Estrella:
My password became the indicator. My password reminded me that I shouldn’t let myself be victim of my recent break up, and that I’m strong enough to do something about it.
My password became: “Forgive@h3r”
My password expired today. Let the new one change my life.