Lately, I’ve had an influx of admin work as I’m shifting platforms. And I noticed over the last few days that all my unrelated work has felt harder, as my brain keeps shifting back to the admin tasks I suddenly find on my plate.…
Continue reading →Posts Tagged → Essays
On Pain and Happiness
A listener recently wrote in about something that stopped him mid-page. He’d picked up Gregory Hays’s translation of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, while working through a hard stretch in his life, looking to Stoicism for a foothold. Then he hit a line in Hays’s introduction:…
Continue reading →Mike Schmitz’s New Ideal Week Builder
Mike Schmitz shipped a free web tool for designing an ideal week template, and it is pretty clever. The interface is a calendar grid. You drag blocks for your work hours, deep work, family time, exercise, whatever modes matter to you. You color them.…
Continue reading →Reading in the Cracks of My Day
Shortform sponsored this post, but they didn’t tell me what to write. Here’s an honest take from someone who’s been using their service for years. On most days, I am not the person who curls up with a book for two hours. I’d like…
Continue reading →Why Stretch Goals Are a Trap
I want to talk about stretch goals, because I think they’re doing you more harm than good. The idea sounds reasonable. You pick your top three priorities for the week, then you add a few more items labeled “stretch goals.” If you get to…
Continue reading →Half Your Day Isn’t Your Job
How much of your day is spent on your actual work? Not the email triage. Not the task shuffling. Not the calendar juggling, the filing, the follow-ups, the status tracking, the scheduling, the data entry. The real work. The creative stuff. The thinking. The…
Continue reading →Drafts Just Got a Lot Smarter (Sponsor)
This post is sponsored by Drafts. Sponsorship doesn’t influence what I write. Here’s my take. I’ve been a Drafts user since its release. It’s the first place text goes on every device I own. Grocery lists, blog post ideas, meeting notes, quick reminders. Anything…
Continue reading →Announcing the 2026 Productivity Field Guide
Hooray! The 2026 Productivity Field Guide lives. This is the course that teaches you to stop optimizing and start becoming. Most productivity advice is about doing more, faster. This course is about identifying who you want to become in every role you play and…
Continue reading →Solving for Meaningfulness
In productivity, we worship efficiency. The fastest way to clear an inbox. The most automated way to track a project. The most frictionless method to organize our lives. I’m going to suggest something different. When it comes to your goals and plans, efficiency is…
Continue reading →The Shop Time Experiment
For several years now, I’ve been getting back into woodworking. It’s a hobby I love, but through 2024, I kept running into the same problem: I never felt like I was getting enough time in the shop to actually make things. During my regular…
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