The Natural Productivity Cycle

In your personal life, when attending to business or working on side projects, how often do you spend 8 consecutive hours in front of a computer? It doesn’t make sense because we lose the ability to concentrate effectively within a few hours.

Everyone goes through alternating periods of high and low mental acuity. There are days when I work on personal projects for well over 8 hours, but the time is always divided into multiple sessions. I might spend a few hours coding a design, a few hours writing, and a few hours reading feeds, moderating comments, and responding to email. Click here to continue »

It’s been nearly 6 months since the first post was published at Pick the Brain. Over the course of 97 posts and 1602 comments, traffic has grown to over 3,000 unique visitors a day, over 2200 readers have subscribed to the RSS feed, and several articles have been featured on the popular pages of Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Netscape. It isn’t the most amazing start (there have certainly been bumps along the way) but I’m proud of what I’ve built and optimistic the site will continue to grow.I want to share what I’ve learned, but it’d be pointless to try explaining it all. Rather, I’ve compiled a list of the 27 most important lessons. Click here to continue »

Note: This is the second update of my experiment with the slow carb diet. If you’re new here I suggest reading the introduction and first update so this post makes sense.

It’s been 2 full weeks since I started the slow carb diet and results are slowly starting to show. I’ve definitely gotten leaner, but for dramatic effect (and because I don’t have a scale) I’m going to hold off on weighing myself until the 1 month mark. Sticking to the muscle gain program has become second nature. Today I was able to walk past a spread of free desserts without eating any, although I was disappointed it wasn’t my off day. Click here to continue »

The Difference Between Experts and Drop Outs

This chart I found at Creating Passionate Users illustrates the development curve of experts, amateurs, and drop outs. An important detail to note is that the line for all three groups starts at the exact same point. Everyone starts as an absolute beginner with no ability. The drop outs never get anywhere because they give up at the first sign of adversity. The amateurs achieve a degree of success but become complacent and stop improving. The experts are the only group to reach the top tier because they continuously improve.

Experts aren’t more productive because they’re more talented or because they work harder. The difference between the experts and everyone else is the optimization mentality: constantly striving for improvement. Although the mentality is mind numbingly simple, only a small proportion of people actually live by it. Why is this the case? I perceive the cause is a common misconception about the nature of success. Click here to continue »