Personal Development with Gray Miller
I no longer subscribe to the meticulous scheduling and monitoring of time in search of a vaguely pornographic idea of efficiency. However, you can’t just turn off that kind of obsession with productivity cold-turkey, nor would I want to. While there may be nothing wrong with just enjoying life in a miasma of yummy food …
I welcome Natasha Bounds from Intention at Home to the Love Life Practice team, and this is the first of what I hope will be regular contributions! No, this is not a post about setting up time in your schedule or doing certain exercises for the next 30 days. It’s not that kind of challenge. …
Spackle. It’s one of those things that is probably older than most of language (you can totally imagine pre-literate man daubing mud at holes in his cave wall). One of the best life hacks I ever learned as a young man was the trick of using toothpaste as spackle. And there is a visceral satisfaction …
As I write this, I’m growing a tree. Not literally, of course. There’s this nifty little app called “Forest” that has a pretty fun twist on the whole “focus time” method. It’s kind of a productivity Tamagotchi, in that you set an amount of time – say, 25 minutes – and you hit “start”. A …
My friend Michele Serchuk, a New York photographer, was talking with me about a new project of hers involving “modern fairy tales”. We were thinking of the ways that moral lessons were conveyed through the classic stories, and what modern lessons might be useful. One in particular that came to mind was the idea of spreading …
Seth Godin is a master of the concise and meaningful blog. I am in awe of his ability to take a hundred or so words and convey a concept that leaves one going hmmmm… for hours afterwards. His post “Tires, Coffee, and People” is a good example of that. Read it yourself (it won’t take long). …
There’s a neat little extension for the Chrome browser called Momentum. All it does is affect what happens when you open a new tab. Usually with Chrome there’s either a default home page (such as your email) or else there’s a bunch of icons of frequently-visited or past web pages. Momentum changes that. Instead it …
Signal to Noise On Friday we talked about how it is a misnomer to think that the urgent and the important cannot – or do not – coexist for all of us. I mentioned that the real problem was differentiating between the urgent and the noisy. “Noise” is a powerful word – and it’s different …
A Simple But Profound Change Last week I said some harsh (for me) things about Cal Newport and his ideas in So Good They Can’t Ignore You. I stand by my evaluation of that particular manifesto, but I don’t want to discourage you from reading more of his work at the Study Hacks blog; it’s a …
Paying Attention Over the weekend I had one of those epiphanies. One of those moments that changes your perspective on things, that makes you suddenly see the elephant in the room. Specifically, it’s the metaphor of the elephant as being the bulk of our subconscious psyche – our emotions, our habits, our desires. It’s an …