"And what of these lists? They’re long, you never get to the end of them, and half the time the tasks on the list never get done. While it feels good to check items off the list, it feels horrible having items that never get checked off. This is all useless spending of mental energy, because none of it gets you anywhere.
The only thing that matters is the actual doing."

"Principle #6: Working for other people (full-time or in some other capacity) often divorces our experience of work from the fruit of our work. Living off your own projects, created of your own accord, is an entirely different kind of existence. And it is AWESOME."

"1. Keep the scope as simple as possible.… 2. Practice ‘Good Enough’.… 3. Kill extra features.… 4. Make it public, quick."

"How to create your first Personal Kanban and visualize your work."

"An Informative Build is a build that tells us what the state of our development is so that we can make an informed decision. We need an informative build, because otherwise Continuous Integration is just a waste of our time.

That’s right, I said Continuous Integration is a waste of time. It is a waste of time, because simply running a build doesn’t help us unless that build can also tell us what we need to do. An Informative Build:

Fails when something is wrong, letting us know that our system is broken and we must fix it.
When it fails it tells us precisely why it failed so that we know what we have to do to fix it.
When nothing is wrong it doesn’t fail. We shouldn’t be wasting cycles chasing down errors due to brittle tests or external dependencies."

"A comparison of features supported by different Google Wave solutions."

"PUT THAT PENCIL DOWN
Using Balsamiq Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it's digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting."

"By taking a relaxing and regenerative break at least every 90 minutes, you increase your capacity to do more work. Just like your muscles need to relax after they tense up, you need to relax after short bursts of focused work. Obviously you don’t want to only take breaks. There needs to be a balance and a blend of relaxation and focused effort. But it’s amazing how many people forget the relaxation aspect."

"As everyone knows, it is possible to get quite a speed boost out of Mail.app by stripping all the bloat out of its Envelope index, an SQLite database Mail uses to store senders, recipients, subjects and so on."

"An early and prominent employee of Google, Georges Harik, recently made the assertion that pairs working together in startups are 20 times more productive than individuals working alone. The author has also personally experienced the boost of what is here termed pairwork in a university setting during the startup phase of several educational and interdisciplinary initiatives. The paper briefly explores pairwork in the history of technology and constructs both qualitative and little quantitative models of pairwork. The quantitative model under reasonable assumptions easily recovers Harik’s 20x boost. The paper also briefly examines the author’s recent experiences with pairwork in four interdisciplinary and educational initiatives."

"...Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) provide a great solution for your WebApp woes. Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite WebApps as a separate Cocoa desktop application. Fluid gives any WebApp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, logical separation from your other web browsing activity, and many, many other goodies."

"If there is one conclusion to be drawn from the life of Leonardo, it is that procrastination reveals the things at which we are most gifted — the things we truly want to do. Procrastination is a calling away from something that we do against our desires toward something that we do for pleasure, in that joyful state of self-forgetful inspiration that we call genius."

"For decades, goal setting has been promoted as a halcyon pill for improving employee motivation and performance in organizations. Advocates of goal setting argue that for goals to be successful, they should be specific and challenging, and countless studies find that specific, challenging goals motivate performance far better than "do your best" exhortations. The authors of this article, however, argue that it is often these same characteristics of goals that cause them to "go wild.""

"I see pairing work so well every day that I consider my career prior to my current job to have consisted mostly of wasting time. When I think back to all the code I’ve written for a job, I’m annoyed at how much less efficient I was then since I wasn’t pairing, and how much better my code and my products would have been if I had paired on them full time."

/replace "design" with "science"/ as well

"Fortunately, we can learn from other fields. Filmmakers operate in a similarly agile fashion, filming scenes in an order dictated purely by logistics. To ensure vision, coherence, and narrative continuity they employ specialists: directors and script supervisors. On the web, designers can play a similar role, but must volunteer and adapt it for themselves. This means getting involved in writing user stories and trying to guide product owners away from over-hasty solutions."

Fucking dotcom entrepreneurs. They imagine that (a) they suceeded because they did something right, and therefore other people just need to catch up by doing it <i>more</i>; and (b) they can do math. Which he can't. Work less, with more thought, and with more care. Be aware of your life and your customer's needs, and SLOW THE FUCK DOWN. The productivity revolution is over; Mister Taylor, He DEAD.

"Friends, I’m done with “productivity” as a personal fetish or hobby. There are countless sites that are all too happy to vend stroke material for your joyless addiction to puns about procrastination and systems for generating more taxonomically satisfying meta-work. But, presently, you won’t find so much of that here."

"The best way to have one good idea is to have a thousand ideas."

"The old school thinking is about individual productivity: but the social revolution has moved past that into network productivity, which entails connectedness and social meaning. The personal hit on productivity is real, but it's not a cost: it's an inve

"Effectiveness uses time to avoid doing only what you have done before, in favor of working out how to do something better."

"Obedience works fine on the well-organized, standardized factory floor. But what happens when we start using our heads, not our hands, when our collars change from blue to white?"

"You’ll learn to get answers by asking other people. You’ll learn to obtain new information by exchanging information with other people. This, of course, puts in active communication with people, instead of being a passive consumer of feeds.

Feeds

It will want a page title, if I install it....

PUBIC BETA

I spent last week corresponding with Marinetti's New Man. He lives, now, amongst us. He cannot be bothered to read this essay, because he is, alas, damned to be himself.

"The main advantage of an un-conference is that it helps build social capital among participants. In addition to the participatory sessions and collaborative / anarchic scheduling, there were places for people to do things together."

"We need to unfocus, to rely more on the network or tribe to surface things of importance, and remain open to new opportunities: these are potentially more important than the work on the desk. Don't sharpen the knife too much."

"Because many of us founders are so accomplishment driven, we tend to look at both activities and outcomes as accomplishments."

On the one hand, this may be interesting. On the other hand, it reminds me of a fellow who wrote a wiki... entirely in Microsoft Word. So I'm ambivalent about market demand.

Nice post, but the comments have the highest crap/word count I've seen in many months. Something about Big Shop Programmers? Work culture is icky; let's just *do work* instead.

I like the sepiatone effect of monochrome with tint but no inversion....

And still more quicksilver productivity porn

More Quicksilver doodads

Been using Quicksilver for months; time to take it to the next level.

Clarification of oft-abused terminology