There is a time and place for the purposeful noisiness of busy. The work surrounding a group of people building an impressive thing contains essential and unavoidable busy and you will be rewarded for consistently performing this work well. This positive feedback can feed the erroneous assumption, “Well, the more busy I am, the more rewards forthcoming.” This is compounded by the insidious fact that part of being busy is you aren’t actually aware that you’re busy because you’re too busy being busy. You have no internal measurement of the amount of time you’ve actually spent being busy.

In my precious hour, I am aware that it is quiet. During this silence, maybe nothing at all is built other than the room I’ve given myself to think. I break the flow of enticing small things to do, I separate myself from the bright people on similarly impressive busy quests, and I listen to what I’m thinking.

Every day, for an hour, no matter what.

Uses for Pastebot, which I have and rarely use.

Keyboard shortcuts are so much more efficient than using the mouse. Only problem: They're hard to remember, especially the ones you don't use all that often. Same goes for things like Terminal commands, Twitter search syntax, multitouch gestures or anything else you can't simply point and click a mouse at.<br />
That's where dashkards come in. Dashkards are cheat sheets you can add to your Mac OS X Dashboard and have them handy at the press of a button. Click on a thumbnail below to view it in full size and add the dashkard to your Dashboard.

Although we recently took a look at some major players in the word-processing world and marveled at their fancy features, if you’re into having a minimalistic work environment and making the best of what you’ve already got, then it will interest you to know that TextEdit, OSX’s native text editing application, is a lot more powerful than you might have given it credit for.

If you’d like to work from home but your company doesn’t currently allow it, why not become the prime mover and first member of a pilot program to see if working from home can’t help boost productivity? It should be easier now than ever to make the argument to the decision makers in your organization.

For Mac & iPhone users to make lists and stay organized. TaskPaper is a simple to-do list that’s surprisingly adept. Unlike standard organizers, TaskPaper gets out of your way so that you can get things done. Requires Mac OS X 10.5 or iPhone OS 3.1

Transform your notes into a simple task management system. NoteTask presents your text as tasks, completed tasks, and sections.

It seems that many of us otherwise computer-oriented geeks have a surprising and earth-unfriendly confession to make: we love paper. Notwithstanding the entirely digital nature of my own trade, for example, I'll freely admit that there is really nothing quite like the smooth glide of a mechanical pencil over a big sheet of crisp, white office paper to facilitate good writing and thinking.

An Everything Bucket, since you’re probably wondering, is what I call applications that encourage the user to throw anything and everything into them. They’re virtual scrapbooks, applying a lightweight organization system to (often) unrelated data of varying types. These applications typically employ a proprietary database, or at best, build atop the SQLite database technology that Apple ships with Mac OS X. They usually default to storing information in Rich Text Format (RTF) or Portable Document Format (PDF). They are Not A Good Idea.

What would be your dream setup?

I have it. One powerful, portable, fast, machine with a high-rez screen and a clean desktop. I don't really believe in dreams when it comes to hardware. These are the tools you use to do your job - you should have the best you can afford. Luckily, we're in the computer business, not the Formula One business. The best computers are affordable, all things considered.

Here’s what I’ve been doing–or at least trying to do–to stay healthy and sane while working on a startup. It’s not rocket science. It may work for you, and it may not. But these strategies have been helpful for me, so I thought I’d share, in hopes that others have an easier time of it.

Our applications help you take control of your inbox.

This Book helps you to move into the Digital era of awesomeness. Download it for free: http://bit.ly/4R9rth

John Gruber's Mac and iPhone setup.

An amusing 25-step guide to investing in camera equipment:

"An investment of $3,195 would have meant you'd have been all set for 3–5 years, perfectly free to concentrate on taking pictures. The expenditure would have amounted to between $1,065 and $639 per year for a very rewarding and renewable hobby. It would have represented a savings of approximately 400 hours of shopping time, $6,575 in cash, and much needless agonizing over trivialities.

Anyway, George, I apologize again for recommending a D700 and two basic lenses even though you're just starting out. No doubt you will want to learn your own lessons, and make your own progress through a succession of gear, just as most photographers do.... as you can probably deduce from the above, my initial recommendation to you possibly isn't quite as flat-out mad as it might on the surface appear."

I've only recently heard of Frank Chimero and started reading him, but I'm delighted I have. Here he rails against our how-to culture (something I'm getting increasingly tired of) and gives us the one true piece of advice we all need: do what you're best at, and keep doing it. There are no recipes.

"Learning and using TRIZ can be very rewarding. While no two people are exactly alike in their motivation to learn and practice TRIZ, there are some immediate benefits that come with increased proficiency. One of the primary benefits is confidence to tackle difficult inventive problems and to raise the bar on products and services."

"Scrivener is a word processor and project management tool created specifically for writers of long texts such as novels and research papers. It won't try to tell you how to write - it just makes all the tools you have scattered around your desk available in one application."

Questions to ask and rules of thumb to use to solve problems and be productive.

"And in a corner of the white board at the end of his long conference room, Mr. Collins keeps a short list. That, he explains, is a running tally of how he’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do."

Summary of four types of people management.

"Slate has asked me to offer you a few words of advice—as I, too, am a procrastinator. Always have been. In college, I'd start 10-page papers after midnight on the day they were due. Half my memories of this period involve screaming at my printer to print faster, ripping the pages from its maw, and then sprinting to my professor's office with moments to spare, sweat streaming down my face."

"The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from."

"From writing in the bathroom (Junot Díaz) to dressing in character (Nicholson Baker), 11 top authors share their methods for getting the story on the page."

Back to basics - 10 principles of productivity from Lifehacker.

Great alternative to OneNote - excellent for ubiquitous capture, as it runs on Mac, PC, iPhone, Blackberry etc.

A checklist for your GTD experience/set up.

I've had Quicksliver installed for eons but need to learn how to use the darn thing beyond opening applications.

I tend to use Evernote as a dumping ground for my GTD projects, but here's how you could set it up as a full GTD app.

A neat venn diagram on why we should combine what we do well, what we want to do, and what we can be paid to do - aka the 'Hooray!' zone.