Posts

Coherence, the quality of forming a unified whole, is about our actions matching what we think and what we say. Pablo Ferreiro and Manuel Alcazar, in their book Managing People, refer to lack of coherence as disloyalty. Although it’s obvious, the term disloyalty gave me a new light on the concept: lack of coherence always has an effect on other people. Disloyalty. This is the attitude of an individual whose actions do not match his words. Read more...

The Bullshit Web, excellent article by Nick Heer on why some webpages take more time to load than 20 years ago, even if our connection bandwith is 20x better. An honest web is one in which the overwhelming majority of the code and assets downloaded to a user’s computer are used in a page’s visual presentation, with nearly all the remainder used to define the semantic structure and associated metadata on the page. Read more...

Daniel Goleman, writing about his father Irving Goleman, philologist and professor: Irving’s signature course, “World Literature: Autobiography of Civilization,” extended beyond the standard cannon to include myths, folk ballads, and oral works from ancient to modern times. The first paper he assigned was an autobiography, with the prompt “Who Am I?” Based on this assignment, he would design a personalized reading list for each student. He chose books that spoke to the issues they faced in life. Read more...

After using Todoist for managing my task list for more than a year, I’ve decided to change systems again1. There’s nothing wrong with Todoist. It can organize tasks into projects, and tag them with contexts. It handles deadlines, integrates well with several mail clients and other programs. Syncronization between the desktop and mobile version works flawlessly. However, Todoist interface somehow gets in the way between me and my task list. Read more...

Showing up every day, and doing your work, even though it may not have the quality you expect, will lead you to producing better work. Austin Kleon quotes this story from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book Art & Fear: The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. Read more...