DayBack’s John Sindelar joins Josh Freeman to talk about time, calendars, and working from home. You have to be selfish to get your work done. Artists know this. If you have a doctor’s appointment and someone calls and asks for 5 minutes of your time, you’re fine saying, “I…
It can be hard to get started, even when you’ve blocked out time to work. Get a rolling start by reading through your last few pages of work to remind you what was engaging you then. And be sure you’re setting an end-time for your work. This means you…
Calendars tell stories about our future–both where we need to be at 8:30 tomorrow morning, and what we should be working on over the next year. And they tell stories about our past: how we got here and what we intended to be working on. We’ve put together a…
Feeling incredibly behind lately, I was telling a friend that I wanted to take a couple weeks to set aside the distractions and work hard to catch up. She gave me some excellent advice. She said that sounded good, as long as I spent that time building systems, instead…
Shame Isn’t a Signal to Cram More Into Your Schedule Why aren’t I working on this project? Why aren’t I doing more writing, getting up earlier, chipping away at this backlog of work that I know is essential? I don’t really know. But I do know that I’m ashamed…
I don’t need a new productivity hack; I need to rewire how my mind sees time Conference season is winding down in software land and while it’s been good to catch up with people I rarely get to see, it’s also really clear that my people are pretty stressed…
Deadlines sneak up on us because we’re always focused just a week ahead of time. Our tools don’t help since most calendars keep deadlines off-screen until it’s too late. We need a calendar that can easily zoom out from your daily work to scan your horizon of deadlines, goals, and…
The Henry in Seattle is showing Mungo Thomson’s Composition for 52 Keys in the first gallery as you walk in. It’s beautiful to see the piano alone in the room, and somewhat spooky to see the keys fall by themselves. Thomson’s Composition for 52 Keys will not run through all…
SeedCode’s KC Embrey has been getting more blogging done recently and told me about how he’s found time for his creative work. Like many of us, KC’s work is a mix of reactive stuff (supporting customers, squashing bugs) and proactive work like blogging. He says that he used to keep working…
