Business Insight Zone

In an effort to improve my own habits, I’m using my Delicious account more to revisit articles and topics that I’ve liked in the past. You know those “Worth Reading” stories in the sidebar? They’re all archived in Delicious, and by this point (nine months along), I have more than 350 items bookmarked there.

Delicious makes it easy to see which of your favorites have also been bookmarked by others, so here are 7 of my own favorites under the “Productivity” heading that have also drawn a lot of attention from others:

1. Paul Graham: Holding a Program in One’s Head - A terrific think-piece on productivity, not just for computer programmers, but for everyone who’s trying to make something new with their work. (bookmarked on Delicious 1,010 times)
2. Think Simple Now: The Panacea for Putting Things Off - “We can only move on with our lives when we can get past our internal conflict between our story of procrastination and our desire to get it done.” (bookmarked 306 times)
3. 37signals: Urgency is poisonous - What I particularly admire is Jason Fried’s principled defense of the 37signals way of doing things: he does not acknowledge that his company lives someplace besides the “real world” of business. (bookmarked 256 times)
4. 30 sleeps: Busy vs. Productive - “Busy-ness is impressive. It puts you in the heat of the action. It gives you an elevated sense of importance. . . . Of course, it’s all just an illusion.” (bookmarked 248 times)
5. Seth Godin: How to read a business book - “If you’re going to invest a valuable asset (like time), go ahead and make it productive. Use a postit or two, or some index cards or a highlighter. Not to write down stuff so you can forget it later, but to create marching orders.” (bookmarked 239 times)
6. 43 Folders: Foo for Bar: Kicking Ass with Outcome-Based Thinking - A simple, boiled-down algorithm for how to apply David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology. (bookmarked 153 times)
7. ProBlogger: 12 Rules for Getting a Grip on Massive ProBlogger Email - Good basic advice for handling a high e-mail load from Darren Rowse, who receives many hundreds of e-mails per day. (bookmarked 25 times)

Besides these posts, I would also point you to Dan Markovitz’s TimeBack blog, which consistently jostles my thinking as Dan applies Toyota-style lean-manufacturing techniques to the world of knowledge work.

Finally, and humbly submitted, here’s a recent post of my own as a bonus:

Self-management tip: explode the stack. - “Pull apart all the pieces, like a mechanic taking apart an engine to diagnose or rebuild it. If you can, do it physically.”

Feel free to nose around my Delicious pages to find more posts on productivity and other topics.

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(Picture from Marion Doss, used under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.)

Category: The working life