Category: Blog

A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise, it’s necessarily not a priority. Got that? You can’t “prioritize” a list of 20 tasks any more than you can “uniqueify” 20 objects by “uniqueness,” or “pregnantitze” 20 women by “pregnantness.” Each of those words means something. An item is either unique or it is not. A woman is either pregnant or she is not. An item is either the priority or it is not. One-bit. Mutually exclusive. One ring to rule them all.

Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities | 43 Folders
by Jonathan Frei

The Future of Science

The Institute for the Future has an exploration of ideas for what they see as the future of science.

Invisibility cloaks. Space hacking. Quantum consciousness. Opensource biology. Empowered with new tools, processes, and skills, scientists will gain new insight into the mysteries surrounding our brains, biology, and the strange matter that makes up our reality. We will develop powerful new instruments for gazing at the farthest reaches of space and descending into the deepest oceans, further illuminating our place in the universe.

You can download the 7 page PDF from the institute’s website.

via BoingBoing.

by Jonathan Frei

GTD Advice Made Easy

David Allen, author of the often cited book Getting Things Done, broke down his system into very simple sections to make it easier to adopt.

He said the key points to GTD are to:

  • Keep meaningful stuff out of your head
  • Make action and outcome decisions about the stuff sooner than later
  • Organize reminders of those items in easy to view places
  • Review it all and keep it current

I have not read Getting Things Done yet, but I come across so many of its quotes, maxims, and applications on the web that I expect reading it would feel more like a review session than getting something for the first time.

With tools like Evernote, Google Tasks, Outlook, and others, getting things out of my head and organizing them are the easy parts. The fourth bullet is the hard one. Regularly reviewing the things on the lists to keep the important things at the top is challenging when everything feels important.

However, the real power of the GTD method is in getting things out of your head so it is free for use.

via GTD Times

by Jonathan Frei