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 [...]

In the previous article on How Your Mind Really Works, we explored the key strengths of human intelligence, such as our ability to identify invariant patterns and to recognize specific instances of them.  But these strengths don’t come without major drawbacks.  The human mind certainly has its share of weaknesses, gaps, and blind spots. It’s wise to cultivate [...]

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 [...]

As a blogger and a former software developer, I must frequently deal with copyright issues.  For most of my adult life, intellectual property has been my primary source of livelihood and remains so to this day.  While some people take issue with the concept of intellectual property and believe that all content should be free, I don’t count [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Stereo vision is one of our more fascinating human abilities.  Our eyeballs capture 2D snapshots of our environment, and our brains and visual circuitry rapidly combine them into 3D images.  So even though our eyes are perceiving reality in two dimensions, by combining the data from both eyes in a specific way, we perceive our [...]

At the start of each new year, in lieu of creating a New Year’s resolution, my tradition is to select an area of primary focus for the coming year.  Whereas a New Year’s resolution may succeed or fail, the choice of primary focus endures throughout the year.  Usually the choice is obvious enough that remembering it is a no-brainer. How to choose [...]