Journaling is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to accelerate your personal development.  By getting your thoughts out of your head and putting them down in writing, you gain insights you’d otherwise never see. Beyond sequential thinking While your brain is technically capable of processing a great deal of input simultaneously, your conscious thoughts [...]

Sometimes we face tough decisions that involve one or more unknowns.  We can’t know in advance what the consequences of each alternative will be.  This is especially true of big decisions like quitting a job, entering or exiting a relationship, or moving to a new city. When faced with such a decision, what do you do?  If you [...]

Too often our important-but-not-urgent tasks get put on the back burner… and never make it to the front burner.  When you get busy with urgent tasks, you may feel pressured to finish those first before you can justify doing anything less urgent.  But then when you finally catch a break, you may decide you need [...]

How is it that your mind is capable of handling new situations you’ve never previously encountered?  How do you solve a problem you’ve never solved before?  Is this just the magic of consciousness, or is there an underlying process — or algorithm — your mind uses behind the scenes to deal with the unique experiences you encounter each [...]

Virtually every time management system teaches that you must prioritize your projects to make sure you’re working on what’s truly important instead of getting caught up in minor things.  However, few systems explain precisely how to do this.  How do you decide which task is really the most important at any given time?  Is it the one that’s most urgent, [...]

Since I receive many questions about this topic, I thought it would be fun to share a candid insider’s look at the reality of being an A-list blogger.  These are my personal observations, so I’m not saying they’re true of other high-traffic bloggers, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these patterns held up.  While I normally [...]

Testing ideas through direct experience is among the best ways to learn and grow.  If you want to know if an idea really has merit, test it under real-world conditions.  Then you’ll have your answer. For example, suppose you want to ask someone out for a date.  One simple test would be to go right up to the person [...]

Here’s the third installment of 33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity (see Volume 1 and Volume 2). These are a bit sillier and less politically correct than the first two volumes — I had to stretch to come up with more ideas – but many are still valid in certain situations.  Just be sure to take them with a [...]

My last article on 33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity got a positive reception, so I decided to come up with 33 more. A few of these are similar to the ones already posted, but most are new.  Sometimes looking at the same idea from different angles can be beneficial. So here are 33 more rules to [...]

Heuristics are rules intended to help you solve problems.  When a problem is large or complex, and the optimal solution is unclear, applying a heuristic allows you to begin making progress towards a solution even though you can’t visualize the entire path from your starting point. Suppose your goal is to climb to the peak of [...]