Business

Don't forget these on your next trip to the library

I recently posted about five of my must-read books. Here are a few more that have really made a difference in my life:

1) 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute

What is it?

If you like this blog, you’ll love this book. Richard Wiseman takes psychology research and tells you how to use it to improve your life in a straightforward (but entertaining) way.

What did I learn from it?

A ton. I learned that:

• Best genre of movie to see on a date? Suspense-thriller.
• Thinking about death helps you identify long term goals.
• Humor and dog ownership reduce stress.
• And a lot of other stuff.

This video describes some of Wiseman’s work.

Check out the book here.

2) Creativity

What is it?

For his book Creativity, noted professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did interviews with 91 groundbreaking individuals across a number of disciplines, including 14 Nobel Prize winners. What do they have in common? What does it take to be a successful creative professional?

What did I learn from it?

They weren’t stars in school. Almost all have IQ’s over 130 — but once past the 130 threshold, all that mattered was effort. They were all curious and driven. They take their intuition seriously. More here.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studies creativity, happiness, and flow. Here’s his TED talk.

Check out the book here.

3) Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think

What is it?

Brian Wansink studies our behavior around food. And his work is fascinating. You eat for a lot of reasons — and hunger is rarely the primary one.

What did I learn from it?

• Dessert tastes better on fine china than a paper plate.
• Big plates make you eat more.
• Wine from California tastes better than wine from North Dakota — even if it’s the same wine with different labels.
• And a lot more.

Wansink discusses his research here.

Check out the book here.

4) Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t

What is it?

Want to understand how office politics works? Want to learn how to get better at playing the game? This is the book. Combines research with examples to give you a modern Machiavelli’s The Prince. Even if you don’t work in an office it’s a must-read because these factors are fundamental to human nature.

What did I learn from it?

I did a whole post about the book here.

Author (and Stanford MBA school professor) Jeffrey Pfeffer discusses some of the book’s ideas in this video.

Check out the book here.

5) Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

What is it?

How can you spur innovation and creativity in your life without taking big risks? Little bets are the answer. Author Peter Sims lays out a system for pushing the envelope without danger, pulling from scientific research and great examples (like how Chris Rock develops his comedy routines.)

What did I learn from it?

It’s an excellent system to make sure you keep learning and growing in almost any area of your life. I posted about the book and similar theories here.

Peter Sims spoke about the book at Google.

Check out the book here.

Again, they are:

• 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute
• Creativity
• Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think
• Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t
• Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

Related posts:

What are the top five books you must-read?

What 10 things should you do every day to improve your life?

What five things can make sure you never stop growing and learning?

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

To-Do Lists Are Evil. Schedule Everything

Some days the to-do list seems bottomless. Just looking at it is exhausting.

We all want to know how to stop being lazy and get more done. I certainly want the answer.

So I decided to call a friend who manages to do this — and more.

Cal Newport impresses the heck out of me. Why? Well, I’m glad you asked. He’s insanely productive:

1. He has a full-time job as a professor at Georgetown University, teaching classes and meeting with students.
2. He writes 6 (or more) peer-reviewed academic journal papers per year.
3. He’s the author of 4 books including the wonderful “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.” And he’s at work on a fifth.
4. He’s married with a young child and handles all the responsibilities that come with being a husband and dad.
5. He blogs regularly about productivity and expert performance.

And yet he finishes work at 5:30PM every day and rarely works weekends.

No, he does not have superpowers or a staff of 15. Okay, let’s you and I both stop being jealous of his productivity for a second and learn something.

Below you’ll get Cal’s secrets on how you can better manage your time, stop being lazy, get more done — and be finished by 5:30. Let’s get to work.

1) To-Do Lists Are Evil. Schedule Everything.

To-do lists by themselves are useless. They’re just the first step. You have to assign them time on your schedule. Why?

It makes you be realistic about what you can get done. It allows you to do tasks when it’s efficient, not just because it’s #4.

Until it’s on your calendar and assigned an hour, it’s just a list of wishful thinking.

Here’s Cal:

Scheduling forces you to confront the reality of how much time you actually have and how long things will take. Now that you look at the whole picture you’re able to get something productive out of every free hour you have in your workday. You not only squeeze more work in but you’re able to put work into places where you can do it best.

Experts agree that if you don’t consider how long things take, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

I can hear what some of you are thinking: But I get interrupted. Things get thrown at me last minute.

Great — build that into your schedule. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Things will change. But you need to have a plan, otherwise you’ll waste time.

Want to stop procrastinating? Schedule. Here’s Cal:

Assigning work to times reduces the urge to procrastinate. You are no longer deciding whether or not to work during a given period; the decision is already made.

Does this sound too mechanical? Overly structured and not much fun? Wrong.

Research shows that it’s even a good idea to schedule what you do with your free time. It increases quality of life:

This study was designed to identify the relationship between free time management and quality of life, exploring whether the amount of free time or the way people using their free time relates to their quality of life… The result has found a positive relationship between free time management and quality of life.

(For more on the schedule the most productive people use, click here.)

Okay, the to-do list is in the trash and things are going on the calendar. How do you prioritize so you’re not at work forever?

2) Assume You’re Going Home at 5:30, Then Plan Your Day Backwards

Work will fill the space it’s given. Give it 24/7 and guess what happens?

You need boundaries if you want work/life balance. But this also helps you work better because it forces you to be efficient.

By setting a deadline of 5:30 and then scheduling tasks you can get control over that hurricane of duties.

Cal calls it “fixed schedule productivity”:

Fix your ideal schedule, then work backwards to make everything fit — ruthlessly culling obligations, turning people down, becoming hard to reach, and shedding marginally useful tasks along the way. My experience in trying to make that fixed schedule a reality forces any number of really smart and useful in-the-moment productivity decisions.

What does research say prevents you from getting burned out at work? Feeling in control of your schedule.

Anything that increases your perception of control over a situation — whether it actually increases your control or not — can decrease your stress level.

Via Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long:

Over and over, scientists see that the perception of control over a stressor alters the stressor’s impact.

(For more on how to achieve work/life balance, click here.)

You’ve drawn a line in the sand and worked backward, giving all your tasks hours in your day. But how do you handle longer term projects?

3) Make A Plan For The Entire Week

I think you’ll agree that the last thing this world needs is more short term thinking.

You’ll never get ahead of the game by only looking at today and never thinking about tomorrow.

How do you write books, teach classes, meet with students, do research papers and be a good parent consistently? Plan the week.

Here’s Cal:

People don’t look at the larger picture with their time and schedule. I know each day what I’m doing with each hour of the day. I know each week what I’m doing with each day of the week and I know each month what I’m doing with each week of the month.

Are you rolling your eyes? Does this sound overbearing? It’s simpler than you think. What’s really necessary?

Just one hour every Monday morning. Here’s Cal:

Every Monday I lay out a plan for the week. I go through my inbox, I go through my task list, I go through my calendar and try to come away with the best thing to do with each day this week. I write it in an email and I send it to myself and leave it in my inbox because that’s a place I know I will see it every day and I’ll be reminded of it multiple times throughout the day.

And he’s right. Research shows you spend your time more wisely when you follow a plan.

Via What the Most Successful People Do at Work: A Short Guide to Making Over Your Career:

Preliminary analysis from CEOs in India found that a firm’s sales increased as the CEO worked more hours. But more intriguingly, the correlation between CEO time use and output was driven entirely by hours spent in planned activities. Planning doesn’t have to mean that the hours are spent in meetings, though meetings with employees were correlated with higher sales; it’s just that CEO time is a limited and valuable resource, and planning how it should be allocated increases the chances that it’s spent in productive ways.

Maybe you think it’s enough to run down the week’s duties in your head. Nope.

Studies show writing things down makes you more likely to follow through.

(For more on how the most productive people get things done, click here.)

So you’ve got a fixed schedule and a weekly plan — but the math doesn’t add up. There’s just too much stuff. Cal has an answer for that too.

4) Do Very Few Things, But Be Awesome At Them

Maybe you’re thinking: I just have too many things to do. I could never get it all done in that amount of time.

And Cal concedes that you might be right. But the answer isn’t throwing up your arms and working until 10PM.

You need to do fewer things. Everything is not essential. You say “yes” to more than you need to.

Ask “What’s creating real value in my life?” And then eliminate as much of the rest as you can.

Here’s Cal:

You’re judged on what you do best so if you want to have as much success as possible you’re always better off doing fewer things but doing those things better. People say yes to too much. I say no to most things. I’m ruthless about avoiding or purging tasks if I realize they’re just not providing much value.

You feel like you have no time but John Robinson, the leading researcher on time use, disagrees. We may have more free time than ever.

Via Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time:

He insists that although most Americans feel they’re working harder than ever, they aren’t. The time diaries he studies show that average hours on the job, not only in the United States but also around the globe, have actually been holding steady or going down in the last forty years. Everybody, he says, has more time for leisure.

So what gives? It feels like you have no time because it’s so fragmented with little annoying tasks that drain the life out of you.

So do less. And be amazing at those things.

(For more on what the most successful people do, click here.)

Your plans are in order and by doing less, it all fits on the schedule. But one question remains: what exactly should you be doing with your time?

5) Less Shallow Work, Focus On The Deep Stuff

All work is not created equal. Cal says knowledge workers deal with two fundamentally different types of work, Shallow and Deep:

Shallow work is little stuff like email, meetings, moving information around. Things that are not really using your talents. Deep work pushes your current abilities to their limits. It produces high value results and improves your skills.

And what’s the problem? Most of us are “drowning in the shallows”:

People who are the most busy often are getting a lot less done of significance than the people who are able to stop by 5PM every day. That’s because the whole reason they need to work at night and on the weekends is because their work life has become full of just shallows. They’re responding to messages, moving information around and being a human network router. These things are very time consuming and very low value.

Nobody in the history of the universe ever became CEO because they responded to more email or went to more meetings. No way, Bubba.

Cal has it right: Shallow work stops you from getting fired — but deep work is what gets you promoted.

Give yourself big blocks of uninterrupted time to make things of value. What’s the best first step?

Stop checking email first thing in the morning. Tim Ferriss, author of the international bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek, explains:

…whenever possible, do not check email for the first hour or two of the day. It’s difficult for some people to imagine. “How can I do that? I need to check email to get the information I need to work on my most important one or two to-dos?”

You would be surprised how often that is not the case. You might need to get into your email to finish 100% of your most important to-dos. But can you get 80 or 90% done before you go into Gmail and have your rat brain explode with freak-out, dopamine excitement and cortisol panic? Yes.

(For more on how to motivate yourself, click here.)

So how do we tie all this together?

Sum Up

Cal’s five big tips:

1. To-Do Lists Are Evil. Schedule Everything.
2. Assume You’re Going Home at 5:30, Then Plan Your Day Backwards
3. Make A Plan For The Entire Week
4. Do Very Few Things, But Be Awesome At Them
5. Less Shallow Work, Focus On The Deep Stuff823

Schedules and plans sound cold and clinical but the end result couldn’t be farther from that.

You’ll be less stressed, create more time for friends and family, and make things you can be proud of.

Here’s Cal:

Knowledge work is really just craftsmanship. It’s just that what you’re crafting is information and not carved wood. You’re crafting ideas. You’re crafting knowledge out of raw material and the more you think about it like a craftsman, the happier and more satisfied you’ll be, not to mention more successful.

The offices of the world could use a few less cubicle drones and a few more proud craftsmen.

A PDF of the extended interview with Cal (including his research on how geniuses work) will be in my next weekly email. Sign up to get it here.

Join over 100,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

Related posts:

6 Things The Most Productive People Do Every Day

8 Things The World’s Most Successful People All Have In Common

How To Achieve Work-Life Balance In 5 Steps

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

According to Apple, this is technology that 'embraces individuality and inspires desire.' What could possibly go wrong?

Your attention is limited and valuable. You need less information. You need good filters

Your life is busy. Work/life balance is a challenge. You feel like you’re spreading yourself so thin that you’re starting to disappear.

Most of us feel that way. But not all of us. The most organized people don’t.

As NYT bestselling author and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explains, the VIP’s he’s met don’t seem scattered and frantic.

They’re calm, cool and “in the moment”, not juggling nine things and worried about being done by 7PM.

It’s not hard to figure out why: they have help — aides and assistants to take care of these things so the VIP can be “in the moment.”

Via The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload:

In the course of my work as a scientific researcher, I’ve had the chance to meet governors, cabinet members, music celebrities, and the heads of Fortune 500 companies. Their skills and accomplishments vary, but as a group, one thing is remarkably constant. I’ve repeatedly been struck by how liberating it is for them not to have to worry about whether there is someplace else they need to be, or someone else they need to be talking to. They take their time, make eye contact, relax, and are really there with whomever they’re talking to. They don’t have to worry if there is someone more important they should be talking to at that moment because their staff— their external attentional filters— have already determined for them that this is the best way they should be using their time.

Must be nice since you and I have to multitask and cut things short to try and get everything done, stressing the whole time.

But here’s the thing: You can be like that too. And it doesn’t require a staff of 10.

So who is your assistant? You are. Then who’s the VIP? You are. (Yes, I am actively encouraging you to develop a split personality.)

With enough planning ahead of time, you can make sure you’re as calm and organized as the President of the United States.

(For more on what the most productive people do, click here.)

We just need to get a few systems in place ahead of time. What’s the first step?

1) The VIP’s Brain Is Empty. And That’s A Good Thing.

The President of the United States is not desperately trying to remember his to-do list.

He has outsourced to his staff all the things that come next so he can focus 100% on what’s in front of him.

No, you don’t have a group of aides but there’s still a key principle you can use: Get it out of your head.

Via The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload:

Shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world… Writing them down gets them out of your head, clearing your brain of the clutter that is interfering with being able to focus on what you want to focus on.

Everything you’re worried about, every to-do, every concern gets written down in one place.

One. Not scattered across a notepad at home, your iPad in the office, your email inbox, sticky notes on your monitor, and your unreliable memory.

That scattering makes you wonder if you’ve forgotten something — and research shows it produces anxiety.

So get it out of your head and on one list. Afterwards, Getting Things Done author David Allen says break it up into 4 categories:

1. Do it
2. Delegate it
3. Defer it
4. Drop it

Once you have those 4 lists you know what you actually need to do and it’s all in one place. Just having that list is a big step toward VIP cool.

Why does this work? There’s some neuroscience behind it. Writing things down deactivates “rehearsal loops.”

Via The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload:

When we have something on our minds that is important— especially a To Do item— we’re afraid we’ll forget it, so our brain rehearses it, tossing it around and around in circles in something that cognitive psychologists actually refer to as the rehearsal loop, a network of brain regions that ties together the frontal cortex just behind your eyeballs and the hippocampus in the center of your brain… The problem is that it works too well, keeping items in rehearsal until we attend to them. Writing them down gives both implicit and explicit permission to the rehearsal loop to let them go, to relax its neural circuits so that we can focus on something else.

Research shows that when you leave things unfinished and worry, it actually makes you stupid. Solution? Write it all down.

(For more on how the great geniuses of history leverage notebooks, click here.)

So you got all the to-do’s out of your brain and onto a list. You know what can be delegated, deferred and dropped — and what you actually need to do.

Now how do you get through the day like a calm VIP?

2) “Mr. President, Your Next Meeting Is About To Begin”

The President of the United States doesn’t check his watch. He’s scheduled down to the minute and aides tell him when it’s time to go.

You may not have assistants but any smartphone has alarms and reminders.

Via The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload:

Time management also requires structuring your future with reminders. That is, one of the secrets to managing time in the present is to anticipate future needs so that you’re not left scrambling and playing catch-up all the time.

Ironically, your phone probably interrupts you with unimportant texts, emails, and status updates — but not about the key priorities for your day.

Few of us have our calendar so organized ahead of time that we can let it dictate all our actions moment to moment.

What’s the key? Alarms don’t work with to-do lists.

As Cal Newport recommends, assign every to-do a block of time on your calendar. Then you can gauge how much you can actually get done:

Scheduling forces you to confront the reality of how much time you actually have and how long things will take. Now that you look at the whole picture you’re able to get something productive out of every free hour you have in your workday. You not only squeeze more work in but you’re able to put work into places where you can do it best.

You’re less likely to procrastinate when an activity has an assigned block of time, because the decision was already made.

And once it has a time block, you can be the VIP. Alarms allow your mind to be calm knowing you’ll be reminded about the next thing.

(For more on the schedule successful people follow every day, click here.)

I know what some of you are thinking: But I get interrupted. I get distracted.

But there’s a way to deal with interruptions — even if you don’t have a Secret Service detail to keep people out of your office.

3) Set Up Filters

Every morning the President gets a top secret document with everything he needs to know from the agencies beneath him.

What’s key isn’t what the document contains, it’s what it doesn’t contain: 50 status updates, 100 tweets, 10 cat pictures and 1000 unimportant emails.

He can focus on what matters because he isn’t distracted by what doesn’t. Meanwhile, you probably feel overwhelmed by information.

Via The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload:

Today, our attentional filters easily become overwhelmed. Successful people— or people who can afford it— employ layers of people whose job it is to narrow the attentional filter. That is, corporate heads, political leaders, spoiled movie stars, and others whose time and attention are especially valuable have a staff of people around them who are effectively extensions of their own brains, replicating and refining the functions of the prefrontal cortex’s attentional filter.

“I have information overload!”, you scream. But as technology visionary Clay Shirky says, “It’s not information overload; it’s filter failure.”

Your attention is limited and valuable. You need less information. You need good filters.

Via The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload:

Our brains do have the ability to process the information we take in, but at a cost: We can have trouble separating the trivial from the important, and all this information processing makes us tired. Neurons are living cells with a metabolism; they need oxygen and glucose to survive and when they’ve been working hard, we experience fatigue…

A good low-tech solution is to hide for part of the day. I’m as serious as a heart attack. Go where people cannot reach you and get solid work done.

That’s not an option for everyone. I get it. No problem. But people who feel technology has left them overloaded with information are using it wrong.

Use technology like a DVR to time-shift your communications. People should reach you when you want them to, not when they want to.

Handle all communications in specified “batches“: a set time when you check email, voicemail, etc.

Some people say, “I can’t do that.” But you probably can do it more than you think, especially early and late in the day.

Maybe your boss wants you ridiculously responsive. Fine. Set up an email filter so only the boss’s emails get through immediately.

Via The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload:

…you can set up e-mail filters in most e-mail programs and phones, designating certain people whose mail you want to get through to you right away, while other mail just accumulates in your inbox until you have time to deal with it. And for people who really can’t be away from e-mail, another effective trick is to set up a special, private e-mail account and give that address only to those few people who need to be able to reach you right away, and check your other accounts only at designated times.

(For more on how to achieve work/life balance, click here.)

So you’ve got reminders and filters and you’re not running around worried anymore.

But when you sit down to work you realize there is still just too much to do. How can you keep calm when there are so many decisions to make?

4) The Incredible Power of “Good Enough”

The President doesn’t make little decisions. The thousands of people working under him handle those so only the big stuff bubbles up to his agenda.

But given you don’t have thousands of people working under you (or maybe any for that matter) you handle every decision, business and personal.

As I’ve said before, “You can do anything once you stop trying to do everything.” Be a perfectionist about it all and you’ll have a nervous breakdown.

Save your limited decision-making power for the things that matter. Everything else should be “satisficed.”

What is satisficing? It’s the art of quickly picking the option that is “good enough.” And research shows it’s the path to productivity — and happiness.

Via The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload:

Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don’t know it. Warren Buffett can be seen as embracing satisficing to an extreme— one of the richest men in the world, he lives in Omaha, a block from the highway, in the same modest home he has lived in for fifty years… But Buffett does not satisfice with his investment strategies; satisficing is a tool for not wasting time on things that are not your highest priority. For your high-priority endeavors, the old-fashioned pursuit of excellence remains the right strategy.

Will this decision result in you losing your job? No? Then opt for the “good enough” solution and focus on what matters most.

(For more on what the most successful people all have in common, click here.)

Your boss’s priorities change midday. More stuff keeps getting added to your list. How can this not throw a monkeywrench into your well-laid plan?

5) “Mr. President, There’s Been A Change…”

When changes come up for the Commander-in-Chief he shifts seamlessly because his aides have already revised the day’s plans. So he stays calm.

You can stay cool too, but it requires a little bit more effort. New things will come in, priorities will change and you need to process and adapt.

Always have your notebook ready to capture new ideas and to-do’s.

And throughout the day you need moments of triage and “active sorting” where you restructure the list from your big brain dump.

Via The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload:

“Your brain needs to engage on some consistent basis with all of your commitments and activities,” Allen says. “You must be assured that you are doing what you need to be doing, and that it’s OK to be not doing what you’re not doing. If it’s on your mind, then your mind isn’t clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind…” That trusted system is to write it down.

Once you update your list, apply the Eisenhower Matrix.

When you know which category everything fits into, you can attack the list in a prioritized way.

(For more on how Navy SEALs, Astronauts and Samurai make good decisions, click here.)

Okay, you are master of your schedule, your mind is empty and you’re ready to focus… Now what?

6) Have A “War Room”

Ever seen a picture of the President’s desk? Does it have piles of papers and 1000 random post-its? No.

Research shows a desk that looks like the aftermath of a natural disaster saps your ability to concentrate.

You don’t need to be a neat-freak but when it’s time for you to stop planning and be the VIP, have a separate work area designed for focus.

Via The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload:

One way to exploit the hippocampus’s natural style of memory storage is to create different work spaces for the different kinds of work we do. But we use the same computer screen for balancing our checkbook, responding to e-mails from our boss, making online purchases, watching videos of cats playing the piano, storing photos of our loved ones, listening to our favorite music, paying bills, and reading the daily news. It’s no wonder we can’t remember everything— the brain simply wasn’t designed to have so much information in one place… The neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks goes one further: If you’re working on two completely separate projects, dedicate one desk or table or section of the house for each. Just stepping into a different space hits the reset button on your brain and allows for more productive and creative thinking.

According to productivity guru Tim Ferriss, focus is just the product of removing distractions.

So you want your VIP work area to have what the VIP needs. And nothing else.

Via The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload:

A germane finding in cognitive psychology for gaining that control is to make visible the things you need regularly, and hide things that you don’t.

I can hear the whining already: But I don’t have two offices! I barely have one!

This isn’t about real estate, it’s about mental space. Your desk can be where you plan, but the VIP works on the couch.

Or your desktop computer is for preparation, but the VIP works on your iPad (which deliberately lacks apps for Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

When it’s time for VIP work you want everything you need to get the job done — and nothing else.

Your immediate environment should make what you need to do easy and what you don’t need to do hard.

(For more tricks successful people use to make themselves great, click here.)

So how do we pull all this together?

Sum Up

The steps to being as organized and calm as the Commander-in-Chief:

1. Get your to-do’s out of your head and onto one document.
2. Lock in your calendar and set alarms so you don’t need to think about what’s next.
3. Use “batching” and filters so you only get the info you need when you need it.
4. Opt for “good enough” on the little decisions so you can focus on the big ones.
5. Regularly capture, triage and prioritize new items.
6. Have a “War Room” that contains what you need — and nothing else.

You used to need a secretary vigilantly monitoring the phone all day… then came answering machines and voicemail.

Technology has come a long way since then and with some planning you can use it to keep your cool and accomplish great things.

It’s hard at first. And, yes, you’ll stumble. You’ll need to tweak and customize. But with time you’ll evolve a personal system that works.

And you’ll learn the lesson that every VIP knows:

The trickiest thing to learn to manage is yourself. But once you can handle that, you can handle anything.

Join over 100,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

Related posts:

6 Things The Most Productive People Do Every Day

8 Things The World’s Most Successful People All Have In Common

How To Achieve Work-Life Balance In 5 Steps

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Apple's watch could be as revolutionary as the first clocks

Many of us already feel as if we’re handcuffed to our computers. With its new smart watch, unveiled today in California, Apple is hoping to turn that figure of speech into a literal truth.

Apple has a lot riding on the diminutive gadget. It’s the first major piece of hardware the company has rolled out since the iPad made its debut four years ago. It’s the first new product to be designed under the purview of fledgling CEO Tim Cook. And, when it goes on sale early next year, it will be Apple’s first entry in a much-hyped product category—wearable computers—that has so far fallen short of expectations. Jocks and geeks seem eager to strap computers onto their bodies. The rest of us have yet to be convinced.

Apple has some experience in taking a lackluster new product and turning it into a must-have for the masses. When it released its iPod in 2001, there were already plenty of MP3 players on the market. None of them, though, had garnered much interest. The iPod, with its simple interface and copious capacity, broke the market open—and revolutionized the music business in the process. With the elegantly designed, eye-catching Apple Watch, the company is hoping to pull off a similar feat for wearables.

But there’s a bigger story here. If the Apple Watch proves popular, it will not just mark “the next chapter in Apple’s story,” as Cook described it. It will change our relationship to computers, weaving the already ubiquitous devices and their apps even more deeply into the fabric of our lives. The personal and social ramifications could be far-reaching.

For a precedent, we need only look back to the development of the last great arm-mounted technology: the wristwatch. The early history of time-keeping machines bears a striking resemblance to the recent evolution of digital computers. Both are stories, at a technical level, of miniaturization and personalization, and both reveal how changes in the design of a common technology can alter not only its function but also the way it influences personal behavior and social norms.

Mechanical clocks started out as large, institutional machines. Installed in cathedrals and town halls, they were the mainframes of their time, and they had a profound effect on the way people lived. Time, which had previously been experienced as a natural, cyclical flow, began to be experienced as a succession of discrete, precisely measurable units. Hours, minutes, and seconds ticked away with industrial exactitude, and people quickly adapted themselves to the new, martial rhythm. Society became more productive and predictable as well as more regimented.

That was just the start. As inventors discovered ways to build smaller, less expensive clocks, the devices moved into people’s homes in the form of wall clocks and floor clocks — the equivalent of the bulky desktop PC that in the 1980s became a fixture of the modern home. With further engineering breakthroughs, clock mechanisms continued to shrink, leading to the creation of the pocket watch. People started carrying time-keeping machines around with them all day, just as we do with our smartphones.

Then, finally, came the wristwatch. People no longer had to pull their time-keeping machines out of their pockets to consult them. The technology was now always in view, becoming, in effect, an extension of the human body. Affixed to the wrist, the watch, as the late historian David Landes explained in his book Revolution in Time, became “an ever-visible, ever-audible companion and monitor.” By continually reminding its wearer of “time used, time spent, time wasted, time lost,” it served as both “prod and key to personal achievement and productivity.” The wristwatch, Landes argued, played a major role in spreading the ethic of individualism throughout Western culture.

At $349, the Apple Watch is pricey, and the device’s success remains uncertain. It does seem likely, though, that the gadget’s arrival will open yet another chapter in the story of personal computing. The watch, as today’s demos revealed, is the most solicitous computer yet. It taps you on the wrist whenever a new message or alert comes in. It formulates answers to questions you receive from friends. It reminds you where you parked your car. It tracks your health. It even allows you to broadcast your heartbeat to others.

That’s all very exciting, but some wariness is in order. As the history of clocks reveals, strapping a technological companion and monitor onto your wrist can alter, in ways that are hard to foresee, life’s textures and rhythms. And never before have we had a tool that promises to be so intimate a companion and so diligent a monitor as the Apple Watch.

Nicholas Carr is the author of the forthcoming book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us.

Relive the glory days of the iPhone

This could be the new iPhone

Remember that you're part of the hiring equation, too

LinkedIn Influencer Liz Ryan published this post originally on LinkedIn. Follow Liz on LinkedIn.

Our client Christopher knew something was wrong. “It just didn’t make sense,” he said. “I job-hunted for six months as a full-time job. I customized my resumes and cover letters. I followed every instruction to the letter. I took over thirty online tests in that time, and I got no interviews.

My background is a perfect match for at least twenty of the hundred jobs I applied for, and a good match for another sixty of them. It’s obvious that the Black Hole recruiting system is broken.”

Christopher is right. You can’t get good people in the door by searching keywords. We can’t convey the power of a person through a mechanical system.

Why would we ever believe that we could?

“I’m fed up,” said Christopher. “I’m cynical. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad.” We thought it was a good thing.

You have to feel a visceral reaction to something that’s broken in order to find your voice sometimes.

You have to feel in your bones, “This is not right. I know I’m a good employee. I know I’m employable!” before you find the courage to step outside the lines.

“I can’t do everything you teach job-seekers,” Christopher told us. “I’m a rule-follower from way back. I can do some of the stuff, but not all of it.”

No problem, we said. Do what you feel. It’s your job search. It’s your life!

Chris tried two Pain Letters and got one callback.

“Let’s see if I can break a rule or two on my first job interview in six months,” he said.

When he got into the conversation with the CFO interviewing him, Chris was surprised how easy it was to get the CFO off his script and into a real conversation.

“We talked for two hours,” he said. “The CFO cancelled his next meeting. I expect to get a job offer. Here’s the crazy thing. I don’t know if I’ll take it!”

Chris found his mojo and realized that he has needs in the hiring equation too. Now that he sees the direct correlation between breaking the old, crusty job-search rules and success on his job search, he doesn’t feel he has to take the first offer he gets.

Here are ten rules to break in your job search starting immediately. You have nothing to lose by stepping out of the box and bringing more of your power to every stage of the job-search process.

What can you lose if the old, robotic way isn’t working for you anyway? As FDR famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

TEN JOB SEARCH RULES TO BREAK

1) Break the rule that tells you not to use “I” in your resume. How absurd! Your resume is a marketing document. You are the product. Six or seven uses of the word “I” in your resume will make it a personal document between you and the reader — the person who could easily become your next boss.

2) Next, break the rule that tells you to list your tasks and duties on your resume. Who cares? You’re different from anyone who has ever held any of your past jobs. Don’t tell us about the job description. We can guess from your title what each job required. Tell us what you left in your wake in each job, instead!

3) Now, break the rule that tells you to reply to a job ad by pitching a resume into the Black Hole of an automated career portal. Your chance of hearing back are close to zero.

Write directly to your own hiring manager — the person you’ll be working for if you get the job. Send that manager a Pain Letter together with your Human-Voiced Resume, right through the mail.

4) Break the rule that says “No direct contact with your hiring manager,” an instruction that shows up in job ads sometimes. Since when are you responsible for reading job ads? You can stop reading job ads right now. You can send a Pain Letter to anyone you want. You just have to find your hiring manager’s name on LinkedIn, and that’s not difficult.

5) Defy the rule that tells you to report your salary history as you apply for a job. Is the employer going to tell you the history of salaries they’ve paid to other people in the same role? They won’t, so why should you lose negotiating leverage by passing on your private financial details? All they need is a target salary number, so give them that.

6) Break the rule that tells you to go into an interview ready to answer questions like a good little sheepie and then go silent, waiting for the next question.

An interview is not a citizenship exam. You can get your manager off the script and into a real human conversation if you try — and if your efforts are unsuccessful, what does that tell you about the person you’d be working for?

7) Ignore the rule that tells you to hand over your job references before you’ve established that a strong mutual interest exists. Firms that pressure you to fork over your references early may be planning to misuse your contacts for their own purposes, as horrifying as that sounds (and is).

8) Blow past the rule that tells you to spend your energy in a job search pleasing people, from the initial resume screener to the recruiter who never calls back. The title of this story is “Break the Rules and Get a Great Job,” not “Follow the Rules and Take any Crappy Job You Can Get.” That is a different story that I will write the minute Hell freezes over.

9) Break the rule that tells you to wait around for weeks while a search committee takes its sweet time getting back to you. Three business days after an interview is more than enough time to decide whether you’re still in the mix or not.

Leave one voice mail message that says “Just checking in before I close the file, since I’m assuming you’re going in a different direction” and then truly close the file and move on. It’s incredibly satisfying to do, as Christopher found out.

10) Last, break the job-search rule that tells you that employers are in the driver’s seat. That may be true in the general please-someone-hire-me sheepie job seeker talent marketplace but it’s never been the case in the talent bazaar where eyes-open managers hire people to solve real business problems that could otherwise tank their companies.

Liz, what if breaking the rules gets me thrown out of a hiring pipeline?

If that happened, would you say “Oh darn, I wished I had kissed more booty in order to have a chance to work with those people?” Or “Thank God, I dodged a bullet!”?

But I’ve always heard I shouldn’t use “I” in a resume.

I always heard that too. Have you ever compared a Human-Voiced Resume to a standard Darth Vader resume? Which one looks more appealing to you?

I have a friend who got an email saying she was permanently blackballed from one employer because she approached the hiring manager directly.

Please congratulate your friend for me! It’s good to be reminded that not everyone is comfortable with your flame.

How did we all get so sheepified?

People have been sheepifying us since we were toddlers. Our education system starts the process.

Did your elementary school teachers tell you “Listen, kids, if I’m wrong about something or you disagree, let’s talk about it! Tell me what you think. Your opinion is just as valid as mine.”?

What’s the first rule for me to break?

The rule about using “I” in your resume and more generally, any rule that keeps your human heft and power out of your resume or buried under layers of sludge like “Results-oriented professional with a bottom-line orientation.”

Put a human voice in your resume. That’s the first step!

In job search as in life, the only people who deserve your spark and talents are the people who appreciate them. If they don’t get you, they don’t deserve you!

Liz Ryan is the CEO and Founder of Human Workplace.

For $100

Get ready for all-you-can-eat pasta.

Starting Monday afternoon, pasta fanatics can purchase online what Olive Garden is billing as limited edition Never Ending Pasta Passes. It buys seven weeks of unlimited pasta, salad, bread and Coca-Cola soft drinks, for the cool price of $100.

Only 1,000 passes will be released, the restaurant said, in conjunction with Olive Garden’s most popular promotional offer, the Never Ending Pasta Bowl. Jay Spenchian, the company’s executive vice president of marketing, said that it “served more than 13 million bowls of pasta during last year’s promotion.”

Both promotional offers will run from Sept. 22 through Nov. 9, and Spenchian hopes the new promotion will “make our fans feel like VIPS.”

Republicans and Democrats alike want to help the company avoid regulations

Uber has pulled off what few others can these days: The beloved car service has united politicians of all persuasions. Republicans, Democrats, and Libertarians are all vying to outdo each other in portraying the popular company, and its political struggles to avoid regulatory strangulation, as a poignant validation of their worldview.

Uber last month hired David Plouffe, President Obama’s former campaign manager and White House advisor, to direct its “campaign” against “Big Taxi” and local transportation regulators across the country. At the same time, conservative Republicans like Senator Marco Rubio and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist championed Uber even though it is the darling of harried urbanites in Democratic enclaves like San Francisco and New York City.

Republicans understandably salivate at the sight of liberals, for once, railing against government overreach – excessive licensing requirements, taxes, and safety regulations – threatening a service they love. Is it too much of a stretch to hope that these ride-share fans might rise up to oppose similar government-imposed obstacles facing plenty of other American businesses – power utilities, financial companies, industrial manufacturers?

Good luck with that. The big regulatory clashes of the Internet era – the various iterations of net neutrality, the Microsoft antitrust case, the disputes over taxing online commerce, the Napster music download battles, the recent Aero TV Supreme Court case, and the current fight over how to regulate Uber, Airbnb, and other “sharing economy” firms – haven’t produced conceptual breakthroughs for how regulate other areas of the economy.

Instead, these “new economy” fights have deepened the dysfunction of our very old political system. Because they have typically involved definitional squabbles— Is Uber merely another limo company? Was Aero TV more akin to your old VCR or a rogue cable company? — and because it is so difficult to update old regulatory approaches, these Internet-era fights stand out for their brazen hypocrisy, cynicism, and intellectual inconsistency.

Take Uber. It’s hard to imagine Republicans cheering the company on if, instead of stealing market share from local union-controlled monopolies, it was stealing market share from a handful of large, publicly traded national taxi companies that had invested heavily in their infrastructure while satisfying regulations the new entrant was trying to avoid.

That alternative scenario is pretty much how things stand in the telecom sector, where Republicans have generally defended the prerogatives of incumbent players against regulators and new competitors preaching “net neutrality” (the principle that owners of the Internet’s pipes or airwaves cannot make separate deals with content providers on price or speed but must treat everyone equally).

But conservatives aren’t alone in their hypocrisy, or semantic creativity, when it comes to Uber. Liberal Uber lovers, instead of addressing cities’ burdensome transport regulations head-on, are more comfortable arguing that the company doesn’t belong in the same category as those old yellow taxis and limo companies. Uber, you see, is a technology company!

This sort of semantic nonsense has been a staple of all Internet regulatory fights. For a long time Internet enthusiasts felt it was OK to “share” copyrighted music and films online widely, since it was somehow different than old school piracy. And if you think Tesla shouldn’t be forced to sell their cars through third-party dealers, arguing that it’s a tech company that shouldn’t be subject to the old rules is far easier than seeking to take on the anachronistic and anti-consumer laws hurting all car companies. Better to create a loophole or carve-out for the new players than to bother modernizing the entire system.

The “sharing economy” moniker, as applied to the likes of Uber and Airbnb, is itself a brilliant but disingenuous fiction. What exactly am I “sharing” in an Uber transaction? As far as I can tell, the company owners are “sharing” with me a driver it has hired so long as I pay a certain amount of money to get from Point A to Point B. The service is good and prompt, but I am not sure what is being “shared” that my community’s yellow cab service doesn’t also “share” with me.

So let’s get real. The transformation of numerous industries by nimble players leveraging formidable information technologies on behalf of consumers is to be celebrated, but not to the point of pretending that things that are aren’t, or that aren’t are. There’s plenty of that already taking place in our traditional politics.

Andrés Martinez is editorial director of Zocalo Public Square, for which he writes the Trade Winds column.