"The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born." -– Nikola Tesla, quoted in Thomas P. Hughes’s American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm

'The numbers in Peopleware come from DeMarco and Lister's Coding War Games, a series of competitions to complete given coding and testing tasks in minimal time and with minimal defects. The Games have consistently confirmed various known facts of the software game. For instance, the best coders outperform [...] ten-to-one, but their pay seems only weakly linked to their performance. But DeMarco and Lister also found that the best-performing coders had larger, quieter, more private workspaces. It is for this one empirical finding that Peopleware is best known. Around their Coding Wars data, DeMarco and Lister assembled a theory: that managers should help programmers, designers, writers and other brainworkers to reach a state that psychologists call "flow"...'

'In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors: “...Work alone...” -- Solitude can even help us learn. According to research on expert performance by the psychologist Anders Ericsson, the best way to master a field is to work on the task that’s most demanding for you personally. And often the best way to do this is alone. Only then, Mr. Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class — you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” ...decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.” The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.'

On the increasing use of brain stimulants Adderall, Ritalin, and Provigil -- 'Anjan Chatterjee worries about "cosmetic neurology", but he thinks that it will eventually become as acceptable as cosmetic surgery' -- ...when enthusiasts share their vision of our neuroenhanced future it can sound dystopian. Zack Lynch, of NeuroInsights, gave me a rationale for smart pills that I found particularly grim. ”If we eventually decide that neuroenhancers work, and are basically safe, will we one day enforce their use?" -- Nicholas Seltzer sees his habit as a pursuit that aligns him with a larger movement for improving humanity. Using neuroenhancers, he said, “is like customizing yourself—customizing your brain.” For some people, he went on, it was important to enhance their mood, so they took antidepressants; but for people like him it was more important “to increase mental horsepower.” He added, “It’s fundamentally a choice you’re making about how you want to experience consciousness.”'

"Is email a distraction? SelfControl is an OS X application which blocks access to incoming and/or outgoing mail servers and websites for a predetermined period of time. For example, you could block access to your email, facebook, and twitter for 90 minutes, but still have access to the rest of the web. Once started, it can not be undone by the application or by restarting the computer – you must wait for the timer to run out." -- From the maker of Freedom

"I’m already trying to do every day: #identify and destroy small-return bullshit; #shut off anything that’s noisier than it is useful; #make brutally fast decisions about what I don’t need to be doing; #avoid anything that feels like fake sincerity (esp. where it may touch money); #demand personal focus on making good things; #put a handful of real people near the center of everything. All I know right now is that I want to do all of it better. Everything better. Better, better."

"#8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done."

"3-2-1 is a countdown timer for Dashboard (OS X). It displays hours, minutes, and seconds, includes a lap function and is resizable. You can label each countdown (useful if you run more than one at a time), enter your own messages (to appear when a countdown has finished) and choose any sound to play."

"#Short, regular work schedule. When I'm working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal — usually a page or two — and then I meet it every day, doing nothing else while I'm working on it. It's not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it's entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes. Writing a page every day gets me more than a novel per year — do the math — and there's always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on. Twenty minutes is a short enough interval that it can be claimed from a sleep or meal-break (though this shouldn't become a habit). The secret is to do it every day, weekends included, to keep the momentum going, and to allow your thoughts to wander to your next day's page between sessions. Try to find one or two vivid sensory details to work into the next page, or a bon mot, so that you've already got some material when you sit down at the keyboard. #Leave yourself a rough edge."

A commonsense: 'Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. -- The Multitasking Crash. The Attention-Deficit Recession. -- Our freedom to stay busy at all hours, at the task—and then the many tasks, and ultimately the multitask—of trying to be free. This is the great irony of multitasking—that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. ...What has the madness of multitasking cost us? (Six hundred and fifty billion dollars...) The better question might be: What hasn’t it?' -- Hehe. NO BAILOUTS FOR THE ATTENTION ECONOMY!

Maggie Jackson: "We are programmed to be interrupted. We get an adrenalin jolt when orienting to new stimuli. Our body actually rewards us for paying attention to the new. But when we live in a reactive way, we minimize our capacity to pursue goals. This degree of interruption is correlated with stress and frustration and lowered creativity. When you're scattered and diffuse, you're less creative. When your times of reflection are always punctured, it's hard to go deeply into problem-solving, into relating, into thinking. ...stillness and reflection are not especially valued in the workplace. The image of success is the frenetic multitasker who doesn't have time and is constantly interrupted. If we forget how to use our powers of deep focus, we'll depend more on black-and-white thinking, on surface ideas, on surface relationships. That breeds a tremendous potential for tyranny and misunderstanding. The possibility of an attention-deficient future society is very sobering." -- *gulps*

"Here's a handy Sandy Shorthand cheat-sheet with complete examples (and shorthand shortcuts) for everything Sandy understands."

'I heard this beautiful bit of advice once that said, “If you’ve got a list of 20 things you should be doing, pick the most important one or two and then just let go of the rest. You will never upload your music to every one of these sites. You will never contact every person. You will never enter every contest. Just take the one or two things that would make the biggest difference in your career, do those one or two, then stop. Turn your attention to the next one or two most important.”'

"Physical, mental… digital: a new health for a new century. Digital Health is the measure, positive or negative, of our relationship to the digital technology we use to get things done in our work, life and organisations."

"Freedom is an application that disables wireless and ethernet networking on an Apple computer for up to three hours at a time. Freedom will free you from the distractions of the internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create."

Comment: Bertil: "... plan, remember, schedule... any night-out demands the managing capabilities of a wedding planner, simply because the cell-phones have transformed a drink into the most social occasional. Too much in their mind implies they optimize."

"The more pressured you are, the more impatient you become of what you perceive as distractions, rather than understanding them to be opportunities. Time consuming skills: empathy, patience and perception become rare: we emotionally deskill ourselves."

"it's not just fastidiousness that makes good hackers avoid nasty little problems. It's more a question of self-preservation. Working on nasty little problems makes you stupid."

"Your old bad habits now help you to work. You're used to sitting in front of that computer for hours at a time. But you can't browse the web or check email now. What are you going to do? You can't just sit there. So you start working." -- I'm in denial.

"... last night I attacked my mac with some blackboard paint, and this morning it's suddenly way more useful. I've gained a whole other display." -- The street finds its own uses for things.

"... a built-in response-interpretation mechanism that is hard-wired into our central nervous systems... If we see someone performing a task we automatically imagine ourselves performing that task. This behaviour is part of our mirror neuron system."

"Don't try to change your identity too many times in one day, unless you absolutely have to. If you designate specific days for specific tasks ... you begin to spend more time in the zone and less in mental transitioning."

"Prologue. Imagine it like a group Twitter." (Free theme for WordPress.com blogs -- make your own private twitter!)

"... creative professionals must develop a mentality for capturing action steps, managing them over time, and feeling a sense of accountability." Some nice sticker sheets to buy

"What are the consequences of living post-Peak Attention? Nobody will be able to understand anything hard unless they make sacrifices."

GTD

Video: 'Answering a few of the many excellent responses to my "Beating the Little Hater" video.' Nice.

Video: "There's a little voice inside my head, and he's out to get me. What does your little hater sound like?" Cartman.

'The term “white space” implies a place set apart, physically and mentally.'

"One-To-One Digital Health Follow-Up's" Haha! Brilliant. Could set up a few mobile casuality units around the place. Charlotte Street?

"I made a decision to institute a high state of cooperation with the world again."

"'What does this mean to me?', 'What do I want to do about it?', and 'What's the next step required to make that happen?'. These are the cornerstone questions we must answer, at some point, about everything," says Allen.

"GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks."

'I compare games with a coffee break. If you are like me, you use them in strategic, functional, useful way," Professor Goldstein says.'

“You are so much more productive in your own office than when you are being distracted by the people either side.” Ha. We have those here. They're called bedrooms. Seriously though, this a big problem in the so-called 'creative industries'.

"In contrast to morning types, evening people preferred the symbolic over the concrete, were creative and risk-taking, and tended to be non-conformist and independent." -- So, i'll be in at 15:00. OK?

"1. Ignore everybody..." (Continues, but that's the key takeaway.)

"Putting the Fun in Functional - applying game mechanics to functional software"

"When you have a good idea, start implementing it without being told. The people at the top don’t have anyone telling them what to do. If you want to join them, you should get used to acting independently."

Structured procrastination. A fancy way of saying we're whimpering perfectionists with too much time on our hands.

"We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. Human attention does not obey Moore's Law."

Damn those shortcut keys look good. (I was previously saving 'read later' posts in a custom del.icio.us inbox.)

"Strategic incompetence isn't about having a strategy that fails, but a failure that succeeds. It almost always works to deflect work one doesn't want to do without ever having to admit it."

"If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult timely tasks as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important"

List, time, then do

"Drucker argues that we should focus on what will make a difference rather than unimportant questions. Otherwise, we will fill our time with motion rather than proceeding towards results."

A better word would be: tactics.

"Twitter is yet another--potentially more dramatic--contribution to the problems of always-on multi-tasking... you can't be Twittering (or emailing or chatting, of course) and simultaneously be in deep thought and/or a flow state."

Avoiding meetings. Avoiding work.

"When bits are infinite, the only way to thrive is to pick up the eraser. This is letting the bits go: always looking for reasons to delete or filter bits that come our way. Bit literacy is the constant attempt, in a world of bits, to achieve emptiness."

Haha! Procrastinate? Moi?

"Extreme Programming initially recognized four values. * Communication * Simplicity * Feedback * Courage * Respect (the latest value)"

Like the Getting Real book from 37 Signals, but more focused on project management.

Robert Putnam (“Bowling Alone”): “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”

"Slife is the new awareness browser for the Mac OS X that lets you visualize your computer activities like never before. Trying to be more productive? Wondering where all that time went? Now you can find out!"

"With a list you almost always know that there is an ending, and what’s better, how long it should take you to read it. People like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, even before they start through it."

Veeery simple upload and share webservice.

Excellent online mind-mapping tool. I wish it had some kind of widget where I can post a flash version of the mind map on another webpage and have it updated in realtime. Kind of like a public draft that other people could comment on. ???

"Applying patterns that help coordinate peoples' efforts and guide the growthofcontent can give your wiki the greatestchanceofsuccess. Equallyimportant is recognizing anti-patterns that might hinder your wiki, so you can fixthem or avoid them altogether."

Could be useful

"huddle is a network of secure online spaces where you and your team, your customers (even your friends) can come together to work on documents, plan projects and collaborate on ideas."

"Google engineers all have "20 percent time" in which they're free to pursue projects they're passionate about. This freedom has already produced Google News, Google Suggest, AdSense for Content, and Orkut – products which might otherwise have taken an

Where the fuck do ideas come from? and The theory of 'Brain Crack'.

Mr Brown told me all this in middle school - and did I listen? Did I f**k!

I NEED this

Great post on using to-do lists

Popular project management tool

A set of free web based tools for managing people, budgets, to do lists. The entire solution revolves around an advanced search technology which allows users to interact with the web and the service seamlessly. Launch pending.

ajaxWrite has been designed to look like Microsoft Word, making it easy for anyone to start using it without needing to learn a new program. Also, ajaxOS, ajaxTunes, etc.

Nice little Web App that let's you keep your to-dos, notes, and calendar together online.

Time and meeting tracking software. Completely web-based, supports team projects, and basic functionality is free. Meeting tracking feature stores minutes, meeting dates, and future agendas. (Very nice site design)