A business organization I am involved with allows members to post questions to the group. It’s a way to crowd-source great ideas. This was a question someone posted: I am perennially looking for ways to organize and prioritize emails. How do you organize your Outlook inbox? Here was my reply:…
I’ve written a lot about the way willpower impacts our ability to make changes that stick. The bottom line: we have a limited stock of willpower. It’s been studied. It’s a fact. Because of this, the key to making changes that stick is to go slow; to break down your…
I read a really good article in Fast Company magazine about to-do list mistakes. I am a big advocate of to-do lists, and of writing things down in general. Here are my favorite takeaways from the article, with my thoughts added: Create/update your next day’s to-do list before you end…
Two articles I recently read reinforced my feeling that most people have too much “stuff”. Beth Teitell writes in the Boston Globe, “Clutter…can assume many forms. It can present as a once-used bread machine or Lego hair that’s come unsnapped from its person. It can look like Tupperware without its assigned…
Just over four years ago, I sold a company I had been involved in starting 25 years earlier. Over the many years I ran that company, we considered mergers & acquisitions as a way to grow. I ended up not pursuing that avenue for growth because I had heard too…
This is a guest post by Courtney Carver. I had the opportunity to read a pre-publication edition of Courtney’s new book Soulful Simplicity, which will be published December 26th by Tarcher/Perigee, a division of Penguin Random House, and I asked if she would like to write a piece about one…
I bought my first iPhone in 2011. I never had a Blackberry, a Palm Pilot, or anything similar—so that iPhone 3G was my first foray into the world of smartphones. I've upgraded it twice since, and now use an iPhone 6. I love my iPhone—just as so many people do.…
“Be Organized” is the fourth of my Six Simple Rules. I am organized in countless ways and have long felt I'm a naturally organized person. But it wasn't always that way for me. My organized life is made up of a collection of small habits I've adopted over time. What I…
I was reading The Undoing Project, the latest book by one of my favorite authors, Michael Lewis. It’s about two psychologists / behavioral economists, Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman. I’ve written here before about their work after I read Kahneman’s amazing book, Thinking Fast and Slow. This excerpt from the…
One thing that bothers most people, is the experience of not remembering why you just walked from one place to another—for example, walking from one room to another in your house, or from one part of your workplace to another. As we get older, we begin to worry if that…
I carry around a super slim wallet and I owe that in part to my smartphone, to a trip I made to Europe, and to my good friends Elliot & Joanne. There are many good things I learned from my dad. But, the fact that my dad’s wallet has always…
I love reading. And I love books. I haven't switched over to e-books yet, and I'm not sure if I will. Over the years, I've kept bookshelves full of the books I read. There were three reasons why I collected books: I liked how they looked on my bookshelves. I…