How to Become an Early Riser – Part II

Last Monday’s post How to Become an Early Riser obviously struck a chord with many people. That post has generated more links than I can count, sending more new traffic to this site than any other post or article I’ve written. And the traffic logs indicate that the surge was decentralized (not attributable to a…

How to Give Up Coffee

Caffeine is the modern drug of choice in the work world, easily accessible, socially acceptable, readily affordable, and of course perfectly legal. As for the health effects, I’ve read evidence both for good and ill, so right now I don’t fall strongly on either side. One thing is clear though — caffeine is addictive. And…

The Inefficiency of Being Too Curious

One of the time leaks I noticed was checking up on certain things too often. I’ve already gotten my email processing down to only once a day, but I found I was still checking up on things like blog comments, feeds, ad revenue, sales through my games site, web traffic, watchlists, and other stats several…

Working From Home

Yesterday I was working in my home office, and my son Kyle was playing on the floor next to me, mostly trying to reorganize my bookshelf. Kyle stood up and pointed to an apple I was eating and said, “thash an apple.” Then he took about 5 steps towards me without holding on to anything…

Managing Your Blog Feeds

Take a feed, leave a feed I subscribe to a number of blog feeds via RSS, but I can’t possibly subscribe to all the interesting blogs out there. I quickly realized that if I kept subscribing to more feeds, I’d never keep up with them all. I figured out that 20 blog feeds would be…

Passion vs. Self-Discipline

How important is passion as a success factor? Some people believe it’s the single most important factor, painting passion as the fuel that drives success. I disagree. Passion is simply an emotional state, and a temporary and unstable one at that. The reason passion gets so much credit is that it helps motivate action. And…

How to Become an Early Riser

It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom. – Aristotle Are morning people born or made? In my case it was definitely made. In my early 20s, I rarely went to bed before midnight, and I’d almost always sleep in late. I usually didn’t start hitting…

Reducing TV Watching

Socrates believed that knowledge and morality were one. In other words immoral behavior is due to a lack of knowledge or understanding. If you’re aware of all the facts of a matter — the real facts, not the assumed ones — you could expect to behave morally and rationally. To Socrates immoral behavior was caused…

30 Days to Success – Postmortem

Today is the official wrap-up of the 30 Days to Success Challenge, where the goal was to adopt a positive new daily habit or discontinue a bad habit for 30 days straight. A big congratulations to everyone who attempted this challenge. If you took it seriously, I’ll bet it proved to be an eye-opening experience…

Effective Online Forum Usage

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. – Herbert Simon Online forums, message boards, and newsgroups are now ubiquitous. These powerful…