Productivity
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Worth reading – post Christmas edition
Why I stopped being so accommodating – from 1922. The approach and language are refreshing.
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Throwing stuff to the wall
Via Marginal Revolution, here comes today’s quote of the day
Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it. (Compare the cost of paying and feeding someone to do a few weeks of [Perl or PHP] hacking to the full cost of the meetings that went into a big company decision.) Don’t overplan something. Just do it half-assed to start with, then throw more people at it to fix it if it works.
The market is a discovery process after all.
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Very well put
From Zeldman on designing on spec
Design is only partly decoration. Mainly it is problem solving. Unless the RFP spells out site goals and user needs in phenomenal detail, you can’t create an appropriate design because you don’t yet know what problems need to be solved.
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Random Thursday links
- How to fix the Microsoft Home Page
- Robert Conquest’s 3 Laws of Politics
1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. - More Stirling Engines how to guides – this one looks a bit better than the last one I posted. Here is another one.
- The top 100 web apps for freelancers – mine is not on it, yet.
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Eating the elephant
The more I think about it, I think the GTD “Open Loops” theory of anxiety is true. Which is why one eats the elephant one bite at a time I suppose.
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Saturday rapid fire
- Forests paying the price for biofuels – not that surprising really. Everything has a cost.
- Good and bad procrastination
That’s the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They’re type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.
What’s “small stuff?” Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary.