The Top 50 Productivity Blogs is one of those lists that I love to hate. It’s so useful and contains a wealth of extraordinary resources, but at the same time will temporarily ruin my productivity as I scour through the archives of the mentioned blogs looking for said resources.
You may know gapingvoid from Hugh MacLeod’s “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards“. Now he’s telling us How To Be Creative.
So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years:
- You are responsible for your own experience.
- Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.
- Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.
- If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.
The lengthy article was picked up by Seth Godin and is now available for free in a wonderfully formatted PDF from ChangeThis. Also worth a read is Hugh’s How To Be Creative book proposal.
I’ve started writing a novel. I don’t have ideas of grandeur or dreams of retiring from novel royalties; I write because I enjoy doing so and because I find it therapeutic. Still, it’s nice to produce legible prose and to do so requires at least a bit of forethought.That’s where The Snowflake Method comes into play.
Good fiction doesn’t just happen, it is designed. You can do the design work before or after you write your novel. I’ve done it both ways and I strongly believe that doing it first is quicker and leads to a better result. Design is hard work, so it’s important to find a guiding principle early on. This article will give you a powerful metaphor to guide your design.
Our fundamental question is this: How do you design a novel?
Thanks Andy
How to Nap is an informative graphic from The Boston Globe detailing how we should nap effectively during the day.
Power naps enhance memory consolidation is an accessible article on why we should nap, drawing on research from Harvard Medical School’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory.
via Neurophilosophy
No, it’s not the new checkout lane at the supermarket, but Dave Bruno’s purging goal (summary):
And honestly, it is difficult to purge. What goes? That is a hard decision. But I have an idea. A spontaneous idea that might change my life forever. I’m calling it the 100 Thing Challenge. And I’m taking it.
“Things are to be used. People are to be loved.” The crazy thing about our consumer culture is that we so often reverse it. We use people to get the things we think we’ll love. How stupid.
Time recently ran an article on the challenge:
That’s not the only dilemma faced by this new wave of goal-oriented minimalists. One of the trickier questions is what counts as an item. Bruno considers a pair of shoes to be a single entity, which seems sensible but still pretty hard-core when you’re trying to jettison all but 100 personal possessions.
via kottke